This Week in EID - Episode 56

We only had three articles on EID this week because of the holiday.  Special thanks to France for remembering that, I had sent her four in advance to put in the queue without thinking. So now you know a little about our back end.

All three articles this week were pretty simple concepts. It is pretty well known that in general task complexity is more of a challenge for users than visual complexity.  But some commenters reminded me not to overgeneralize.  There are cases where visual complexity is a greater challenge and there are certainly some visual designs that are so cluttered that they make any usefulness impossible.

Thanks to Alex Rodriguez for pointing out a good analogy with our Skype/Sky trademark dispute.  He noted that FIU and FNU had a similar dispute.  When I worked at FIU, everyone was always asking me if that was the same thing as FAU, so I can appreciate the ease of confusion.

Finally, we had an interesting example of guerrilla design. A designer who had trouble with the signage in Manhattan subway stations designed his own replacement and actually put them in place.  I am not sure if the transit authority left them there for long, but it was at least long enough to get an article in Fast Company. 

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these.