Dont Do This
One of the odder Tekka departments is titled "Don't Do This". This week, that seems extraneous -- we've had lots of examples of what not to do! But seriously folks....
The business press has fallen into a nasty habit over the past decade of assuming that failure results from idiocy, that winners are smart and losers in business are fools. This is false: there are more ways to fail than to succeed. It's also unhelpful; since you and I are not idiots or knaves, the business press doesn't help us learn from other people's disasters.
The user interface/human factors community has the same bad habit. It's not enough to identify a design flaw, you have to hold it up to ridicule. What dolt designed that?! Occasionally, bad designs get built out of stupidity, but often there's something else to learn.
Hence, Don't Do This. Short notes about things that didn't quite work, and where they might have gone wrong. In this installment, for example, Anja Rau looks at an all-night German television show that set out to spotlight multimedia. It sure sounded cool. What went wrong?