This post has been a long time coming. Originally it was going to be an entire series of posts (remember when I used to post more than 5 items a month? Good times), going into an inane amount of detail, and featuring case studies on every single aspect of the featured subject.

It is about doors.

You might be thinking that I couldn't possibly be dull enough to fill post upon post with doors. The idea was going to be to examine what is arguably the most common object in everyday human interaction and go into why it is, pardon my French, fucked up so often. I would start with looking at each component (primarily the handle, but any windows play an important part in interaction) and show how they are usually done so badly as to make the primary task of opening a door more difficult for people.

It was to be an opus on how, by paying attention to the task at hand and examining small details, to best design an object. But all you really need to know is this:

Excluding life threatening situations, door design is the single most common bit of bad design. Remember: handles mean pull, panels mean push. Never change this. For large values of never.

Ever have to design a door? Now you know how. Ever need to design a car, pen, website or anything, bear the above lesson in mind.

During the development of a software product we all make numerous design decisions. Some decisions are done in early stages of development, while analyzing the requirements and gathering the overall architecture of the product. Other design decisions are done during the lower-level design. Finally, even during the implementation of the a single component, we are often in position to weight several design options against each other.

In the following discussion we will examine one of the common design aspects, which is the source of numerous design dilemmas: should we design the product such that it will be ready for a future change (in the requirements, in technology etc.), or should we settle for a straight forward implementation? When is our product “sufficiently-designed” and when is it “over-designed”? In other words, how can we find the golden path when it comes to designing a software system to be ready for future changes?

Read the article...

And it dawned on me last week that maybe next time we, too, create a contest for our customers to create our website or what they see our website should reflect. Link >>