Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Jason Fried of 37 Signals on their design philosophy:
"At 37signals we're pretty anti-preference/setting. When we Get Real we try to make informed decisions for the people who use our products so they don't have to think about preferences or settings or adjustments - they can just use the product and know that the people who built it already thought about the best ways to design it, use it, and view it."

I would call this the control philosophy of design, which makes sense when your goal is to control the customer experience. It is an approach that makes sense in some cases where the scope of the application is very limited.

Its success hinges on the idea, however, that it is possible for the designer to anticipate and know what the user needs better then the user themselves. It assumes that people's behaviour as they interact with computers can be generalized, and that it can be known in detail by the designer.

By providing people with a single, unalterable experience, you maintain control, but in my opinion reduce the overall interactivity of the application.