“Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand”. Read Jakob Neilsen’s Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes.

While we work on complex web applications, such as for CBD/TPdb or Faculty of 1000, we have to consider the balance of ease-0f-use and creating context for users so that they can understand what they are looking at. Cathy Shive discusses ‘Computer Administrative Debris’ in applications (found via John Gruber).

The New York Times (login required) compares the relative website design of US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to the debacle between Macs and PCs.

The U.S. is going through a period of concern about literacy in the young, but it is not all as it seems. Steven Johnson in The Guardian talks about how many people are reading more than ever.

The internet is often thought as being a vast virtual ‘cloud’ that spans the world, built primarily by software. It is then somehow a surprise when you are reminded just how physical the infrastructure the internet is built on actually is. Whether it is by the recent news that a single cable in the Mediterranean broke so Asia and the Middle East had to do without their MySpace fixes, or maps such as this that show just how we are all connected.

Adrian Shaughnessy for the Creative Review visits Wolff Olins, the company he was critical of due to their Olympics 2012 logo… and has his expectations confounded.

“Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with ‘Where am I?’ puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.” One of the leading lights of the design world, Edward Tufte, has casts his eye over the iPhone and how it deals with information on a small screen.

Our airport and aeroplane loving colleague Christian recently spent a day at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5.

‘User Determined Computing’  is the rather clunky Accenture created phrase for the situation where people are fed-up with their work-based technologies as their home-based technologies are easier and better.

How the cheap and plentiful technologies that power ‘Web 2.0’ may be leading to a drop in the job market. The early paranoid fear that computers and robots are taking our jobs might finally be coming true. Between 2001 and 2007 “online employment had actually dropped 29%”. This is Nick Carr’s thesis as explained in The Guardian.

Recently on our CIH Housing and Global DataPoint projects we have been investigating best practices for presenting and explaining events - a deceptively complex issue. Via the 37 Signals blog we came across New York Magazine’s Agenda interface.

The BBC has launched a beta version of its new homepage, and we at FoxLand Towers are quite excited about it. We love how you can customise the information it displays and then move your “info widgets” around the page. Some of us aren’t so sure about the use of a large Verdana font and the buttons may be a bit too Web 2.0, but the general concensus is that it looks great. And those of us who are old enough to remember get a twinge of nostalgia from the retro clock. Shame they couldn’t find room for the noughts and crosses playing test card girl…

For those of you who may be interested in such things, here’s a sneak peak of what the BBC may (or may not) be doing with their homepage. Personally, I like the retro clock. (Found via Plasticbag).

Jeffrey Zeldman explains web design: “The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.”

We regularly research Content Management Systems, and in a recent spate of Googling I came across an article by Jeffrey Veen called “Making A Better Open Source CMS” from 2004. Sadly, most of its points are still completely relevant. Three years later and it is still hard to find a system that feels it is put together with the average user in mind (i.e. not techies). While Wordpress is not in any way perfect (what is?) or powerful enough (what is, unless custom built?) for all situations, it is relatively easy to comprehend for the user, which is why we so often recommend it.