Simplicity
The complexity taxSeptember 15, 2008: The complexity tax is demanded by those who want to create dependency. More
Information is causing global warming
September 01, 2008: An information tsunami is sweeping the world, eating up vast quantities of time and energy. More
Why does the OK button say OK?
June 30, 2008: Words are critical to task completion on websites and in applications. Yet they are still chosen carelessly. More
Great websites do, not say
January 14, 2008: Never tell people what you're going to do for them on the Web. Just let them do what they came to do as quickly and simply as possible. More
The collaborative Web
December 10, 2007: The essence of the Web is about linking, sharing and collaboration. Productivity and value creation is driven by cooperation. More
The best websites are useful and ugly
July 23, 2007: Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks. More
Easy to use: Why the Web demands simplicity
March 19, 2006: The more sophisticated a society and its economy becomes, the easier it is for its citizens to do what they need to do. More
Simplicity demands difficult choices
July 10, 2006: Too much web management suffers from trying to be all things to all people. Apple and Google have triumphed from targeting common tasks. More
Complexity delivers short-term gain but long-term pain
July 03, 2006: Complexity sells (sometimes). Customers are often impressed by all the extra features. The mood can change when they have to use the product. More
How Google manages its homepage
December 05, 2005: An average person can deal with only 7-10 choices on a webpage, according to Google research. That's why it's so hard to get a link on the Google homepage. More
Ryanair success has strong web lessons
November 11, 2005: Despite record fuel prices, Ryanair makes record profits. Its no-frills website has helped this no-frills airline achieve such phenomenal success. More
Hurricane Katrina and the Dot Com Bubble
October 11, 2005: There has never been more information. And that’s exactly the problem. Too much information too quickly published is just as bad as too little. More
Simplicity is hard work
August 15, 2005 Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. What is simple to the creator is rarely so simple to the customer. More
Recall ability: Web content versus print content
July 18, 2005: People are extremely task-focused on the Web. That means they are much less open to content that is not directly related to the task at hand. More
Achieving greater simplicity involves managing increasing complexity
November 22, 2004 : Never before has there been so much to choose from, and never before has it been more important to eliminate most of these choices. More
Do you manage a website or a warehouse?
November 15, 2004 : There are two types of people involved in websites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity. The latter better start looking for a new career. More
Less is more for university websites
September 20, 2004 : Many university websites are poorly organized, and filled with out-of-date content that has been directly published from print. Delivering a better service to students and staff faces challenges because of decentralized management structures and concepts such as academic freedom. More
Less is more for government websites
September 13, 2004: Many governments have so far approached the Web with a rather crude strategy of getting every service online. This has resulted in a proliferation of often poor quality websites. The strategy should be to identify the most appropriate government services for the Web and to do them really well. More
Spam is tip of iceberg of information overload
May 26, 2003: Spam reflects an information economy where content is extremely easy and cheap to publish. Spam is just the tip of the iceberg. For every page printed, there are 30,000 'pages' published on computers. Today, glut is a far greater problem than scarcity. We are slowly being drowned by vast quantities of useless content. More
Technology can make you fat
February 10, 2003: There are those who believe that technology is the answer to all our problems. A smaller group believe that technology is the root of evil. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in-between. However, increasingly, technology is encouraging more dependence that independence. More
Thinking should come before communication
December 09, 2002: Communication has become the great fashion and addiction of our age. Kids think a mobile phone is cool. Workers think that communicating is a sign of productivity. Communication may make you look cool, but it does not necessarily make you more productive. Communication, without thought, is in fact an unproductive activity. More
Information overload: it's time to take your time
October 7, 2002: The technology industry has a blind and zealous faith in speed and innovation. Society in general has bought into the change is good mantra. We have become a world of instant communicators, speed merchants and multitaskers. Greed is the first cousin of speed. We have bought into the belief that we can get rich quick without any real effort. We can't. More
Information technology: Trojan Horse of information overload
September 30, 2002: Information technology has become the Trojan Horse of information overload. It has been invited into the organization as some magical gift that will bring greater efficiency and reduced cost. Once inside, it feeds on resources and spews out unimaginable quantities of low quality data. Information technology has become the problem. The solution is to invest in people again. More
Information overload: you need to get organized
August 19, 2002 : Information overload has striking similarities to pollution. Long-term thinking and planning is what is required to find a genuine solution. While national and global initiatives are important, the individual has a role to play too. We can create less content. We can organize what we have better. More
Information overload: learning to take your time
August 05, 2002 : Today, we are compelled to act quickly. Acting quickly and acting intelligently are not necessarily the same thing. The more mobile calls we make and take, the more emails we receive and send, can make us less, not more, productive. To be successful we need to learn how to take our time. More
Information overload: too much information, too little time
July 29, 2002 : There is an underlying trend that connects the current stock market crisis and the September 11 terrorist attacks. The information society is producing too much information and there is too little time to properly digest it. The problem will get worse. Information overload is the key challenge of the information society. More
A day in the life of an information worker
December 3, 2001>: Being an information worker is a bit like being a hunter-gatherer. Instead of hunting for food you are hunting for information. The life of the information hunter-gather is not easy. For instead of wading through swamps and climbing treacherous mountains, this info hunter-gather wades through search results and stumbles through data fog. More
Email: too much of a good thing?
November 05, 2001>: Email is regarded as a primary tool of the new economy. It has become a critical means of communication for a great many organizations and individuals. Email is used because it makes communication more efficient and cost effective. However, there are signs that email aids unnecessary communication. Is email becoming a productivity drain, rather than a productivity gain? More
The technology productivity paradox
October 29, 2001: The basic promise of technology is more efficiency and thus greater productivity. However, the links between more technology and more productivity have historically been weak. As the Nineties progressed, we were told that that had all changed. Technology has reached critical mass within organizations, the reasoning went, and now we were finally seeing a surge in technology-fueled productivity. A recent McKinsey report begs to differ with this logic. More
Is speed God or the devil?
August 06, 2001>: On the one hand, the McKinsey Quarterly, in a recent study of 80 Internet companies, concluded that, “moving fast at the expense of developing a solid business plan and gathering the right resources rarely paid off. Speed gave an advantage to 10 percent of the companies studied, and only if certain conditions were present. When they were not, moving fast provided no discernible advantage or turned out to be costly.” More
Cheap disk space has its downsides
May 28, 2001 :Cheap computer disk space allows for the economic storage of content. However, it also encourages bad habits in relation to how content is managed. Because the ‘price’ you pay for storing that extra document is so low there is little incentive to examine whether that document is worth storing in the first place. This is not a good thing, in that it feeds information overload – probably the most critical problem the information economy faces. More
Information overload - the sequel
October 23, 2000: “The world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.” (How Much Information report, University of Berkeley.) More
The information virus
June 05, 2000: There is a type of virus that infects our bodies. There is a type of virus that infects our computers. There is a type of virus that infects our time. More
