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.
