Blog is on pause, but please do enjoy my tweets :)

Design for errors

Example of Nielsens usability principle "design for errors" emerges in this "there I fixed it" -type of improvement of attached traditional finnish craftmanship.

Another good principle of "keep it simple" has failed in this case and there is some reported cases, when somebody has carefully closed the door behind - and locked a poor soul into the hut. Then again the repair (red string going inside the door) is kind of simple too ;)

Powerpoint organizations

2003 Columbia space shuttle was hit by a 760g piece of insulation with life threatening result. The threat was analyzed and presented to managers for decision making. Decision was to take shuttle down as planned. Seven lives were lost.

Data visualization specialist Edward Tufte analyzed the slide that was used to communicate the threat and pointed out several reasons why Power Point is a wrong tool to communicate complex information for decision making.

Similarly, PowerPoint can be dramatically wrong tool for creating organizations compared to any nodal presentation.
A human way to use PowerPoint is to pursue harmony, balance and clarity. This can result as over simplifying organizations into boxes with arbitrary amount of size eventually linked with solid or dotted lines.
After a few years of continuous experience of organizational changes, I claim that boxes don't discuss and further, cross discipline UX specialist don't belong to any boxes.

Conclusion is that, if you want to "use UX professionals in all levels of your organization", but you don't want to increase your headcount, stop lying to yourself and admit that your organization will not be a UX driven one. -Possibility that a rationally thinking manager in resource pressure would create a PowerPoint box for cross disciplinary UX specialists is expected to be quite low.

Facebook now showing clearly what information is shared to applications

Facebook changed the way they present the information shared to 3rd parties through applications.

Now the information shared to 3rd parties is listed in clear language and creates a feeling of trust through it's transparency.