The Benefits of Applying Interface Guidelines

There's a good explanation of the benefits of following the most basic conventions for the UI platform you're designing for from the Apple (OS X) Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.

"The implementation of Apple’s human interface principles make the Macintosh what it is: intuitive, friendly, elegant, and powerful."

Segmenting Users with Navigation Games
The Rayovac corporate site has one of the worst navigation bars I've seen on a company web site in a long time. Talk about bad interaction design. Try selecting "About Rayovac", then mouse into the body of the page, then try to click on one of the second level navigation options like "Supplier Diversity." Depending on the path your mouse travels, your target is likely to disappear before your mouse gets there. Yet another gratuitous use of Flash. Maybe one of their design goals was to make navigating something of a puzzle - a challenging game of manual dexterity. Then again, maybe their target customers are people who could win at the classic kids' game "Operation."

[Via Andrew's HeyBlog]

Usability will win the war
Googlefight, the number one research source I never hesitate to miss, says usability will beat Saddam Hussein...Now the whole world will know that usability kicks butt!

Googlefight research also proves that developers defeat usability. That 'research' quantifies just how much developers defeat usability, although it offers no real explanations for the findings or how to turn the tide. Maybe Jared Spool offers a solution to this confused problem with those blankety-blank developers when he recommends usability folks "search for seducible moments." Of course, you can get fired or sued or even better for doing stuff like that, so be careful when implementing that recommendation with developers. Keep in mind that even if they say they want do some 'unit testing' with you later, that doesn't mean you should treat them like 'objects.'

Jakob Nielsen doesn't disagree with Googlefight when he says "numbers are powerful." He adds that "such metrics are great for assessing long-term progress" and suggests that we look at our success rate. Maybe Jakob will grant me "partial credit" for this blog post...

James Lileks on the Saddam Interview
Okay, so I went on a rant about Dan Rather's interview with Saddam. I blasted CBS pretty hard, but I think they deserve it. James Lileks (who has a great blog) is a little softer, but makes basically the same key points - maybe lack of subtlety is why I don't get paid to write for a major newspaper like he does.

Some excerpts from Lileks' Bleat today:
"The tyrants of the 20th century have become iconic, and as such they seem to exist divorced from human nature. Men that evil are so rare it's almost comforting to watch them - oh, we'd know their kind if they came again. But we don't. The lesson is lost. Hitlers and Stalins and Maos and Kim Il Jungs aren't the anomalies, really; there are millions of people like them. They're just the ones who had what it took."

"What made Rather's trip such a waste was the water-kneed obsequiousness of it all. He was more interested in three full hours of bland conversation than 20 minutes of sharp discussion that ended with Saddam leaving the room. What was there to fear? Anyone think Saddam would have him shot? Stand up in the middle of the interview, put a round through Rather's skull and yell at his dead body for five minutes? Since the Iraqis controlled the production facilities, CBS apparently feared they wouldn't get the tape if Rather didn't gargle with Meek Juice before each question. Fine. As long as you realize that Rather would have been tougher on the Pope."

"Not so with the Saddam interview. The deference was pathetic, the questions toothless, the answers predictable. Sometimes history is farce the first time."

Lileks points out that CBS gave Saddam an opportunity to appear like just a normal, nice guy, and that Hitler would have appeared no different given the chance. How many psychopathic murderers have we seen on trial in our own country - people that neighbors and friends would never have suspected of mass murder or gruesome atrocities? Yet, I truly believe there were many people who fell for the 'nice guy' Saddam image CBS presented in all its prime-time glory. Proof: check out news sites and count the number of editorials discounting the interview versus the number of stories reporting Saddam's desire for a debate with Bush or his refusal to disarm. Most media outlets took this interview straight on, hook, line and sinker.

Aw, c'mon, that Butcher in Baghdad, he's really a nice guy
Let me get this straight - CBS' "unbiased and balanced" media whores (including Dan Rather) will bend over backwards for an exclusive 'interview' with a known mass-murdering dictator. They'll then pitch a bunch of softball questions at said murderer - who dons a nice suit and tie (as opposed to his usual military fatigues). This monster, responsible for nearly two million deaths, is then given more than an hour of prime-time network airtime to spout lies and retoric. Yet, a White House spokesman (not a known killer or rapist) isn't good enough (in the judgement of the 'fair news editors' at CBS) to represent the U.S. administration's rebuttal to this circus of an 'interview' aimed at snagging big numbers during ratings sweeps week. CBS would accept no less than a Secretary of State's mug on their network - evidently Ari Fleischer's face is too commonplace these days to draw the requisite viewers and ratings. Talk about selling your soul to the devil.

"White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told Reuters the White House had offered a representative to counter what he said would be propaganda, lies and "irresponsible statements" by Saddam in the rare interview. He said CBS replied it was interested only if President Bush made the response himself -- which he said the White House rejected on the grounds that it could imply a "moral equivalence" between the two leaders. CBS made a new offer on Wednesday. "If the president, the vice president or Secretary of State (Colin) Powell would like to appear on the program tonight we would be happy to have them appear on the program," Genelius said."

A Butcher? In who's opinion?
"According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2001, Iraqis have become the second largest group of refugees in the world. Iraqis also top the table of foreign nationals seeking asylum in the UK. Saddam Hussein has been ruthless in his treatment of any opposition to him since his rise to power in 1979. A cruel and callous disregard for human life and suffering remains the hallmark of his regime.

Torture is systematic in Iraq. The most senior figures in the regime are personally involved. Saddam Hussein runs Iraq with close members of his own family and a few associates, most of whom come from his hometown of Tikrit. These are the only people he feels he can trust. He directly controls the security services and, through them and a huge party network, his influence reaches deep into Iraqi society. All real authority rests with Saddam and his immediate circle. Saddam is head of state, head of government, leader of Iraq’s only political party and head of the armed forces.

Saddam has, through the RCC, issued a series of decrees establishing severe penalties (amputation, branding, cutting off of ears, or other forms of mutilation) for criminal offences. In mid-2000, the RCC approved amputation of the tongue as a new penalty for slander or abusive remarks about the President or his family. These punishments are practised mainly on political dissenters. Iraqi TV has broadcast pictures of these punishments as a warning to others.

According to an Amnesty International report published in August 2001, ‘torture is used systematically against political detainees. The scale and severity of torture in Iraq can only result from the acceptance of its use at the highest level.’ Over the years, Amnesty and other human rights organisations have received thousands of reports of torture and interviewed numerous torture victims.

This report, based on the testimony of Iraqi exiles, evidence gathered by UN rapporteurs and human rights organisations, and intelligence material, describes the human cost of Saddam Hussein’s control of Iraq. It examines in turn Iraq’s record on torture, the treatment of women, prison conditions, arbitrary and summary killings, the persecution of the Kurds and the Shia, the harassment of opposition figures outside Iraq and the occupation of Kuwait."

Saddam Hussein’s Regime’s Methods of Torture
- Eye gouging
- Piercing of hands with electric drill
- Suspension from the ceiling
- Electric shock
- Sexual abuse
- "Falaqa"
- Other physical torture
- Mock executions
- Acid baths
[I'm leaving out the gory details here...]
     - from SADDAM HUSSEIN: crimes and human rights abuses, UK gov't

So what?
No matter what your opinion is on the impending war with Iraq, I think it's very clear that giving a man like this so much airtime to spew his lies and deceit is irresponsible. There were no questions about mustard gas, Kurds or torture. No tough quesions about the facts related to weapons of mass destruction. And through it all, CBS smirking all the way to the bank as they throw away any last remaining shred of journalistic integrity they used to have.

The day a major American TV network sells out to a tyrant and then says a White House spokesman isn't important enough in the interests of editorial balance is the day I quit watching that network. Anyone else have a mind to boycott CBS?

References:
- A biography of Saddam Hussein
- SADDAM HUSSEIN: crimes and human rights abuses A report on the human cost of Saddam’s policies by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK government
- Tales of the Tyrant - a fascinating account of Saddam's daily life, a glimpse at the man behind the tyranny.

A Call to Action:
"There must be a law governing humanity and governing relations in humanity, that there should not be an aggressor while others are silent about the aggression. There should not be a killer while those who watch and applaud the killing. There should not be an occupier of the land belonging to others while there are those who keep quiet and never move to remove the occupation"
     - Saddam Hussein in his interview with Dan Rather

Saddam, I agree - and I believe one way or another, whether at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, or at the hands of your own people, you, the agressor, killer, and occupier, will be removed from your occupation of terror in Iraq.

Is Microsoft deliberately sabotaging their user experience?
I believe Capitalism works, I don't think Microsoft is evil, and I don't use Opera, but after reading "Opera 'borks' MSN in standards spat" I can't say I'm impressed with the folks at Microsoft and MSN. It sounds like MSN is screwing with Opera users on purpose and it appears to be an attempt to get those users to switch back to IE. What value is there in deliberately "displaying [MSN] pages improperly" for Opera users? Does that help MSN's advertisers? I don't think so. Does it make their content more accessible? I don't think so. Does it make any sense? No.

Consider these points:

1. MSN can only make less money for Microsoft and advertisers by breaking pages for users.
2. Opera is pretty darn standards compliant and clearly supports enough standards that the MSN designers could easily send Opera users a page which displays correctly. Don't tell me they've never heard of "graceful degradation." (From the sound of it, nothing would need to "degrade" anyway - MSN just needs to code things correctly.)
3. Many of MSN's pages don't validate or have bugs, and IE isn't 100% standards compliant either.
4. Most web users don't give a thought to technical standards, nor should they. Do car drivers care about what "standards" their vehicles are engineered to?
5. Web users upgrade browsers infrequently and standards evolve. This means not all standards will be supported by all browsers used by MSN's users at any given point in time.

According to Opera:
"In October 2001, Opera users were blocked from the MSN site. The event caused an uproar among Web users and MSN was forced to change their policy. However, MSN continues a policy of singling out its Opera competitor by specifically instructing Opera to hide content from users .... MSN now allows access to users of Opera 7, but is still targeting and sending users of earlier versions a broken page. This treatment is completely unnecessary, as the page would look the same in Opera as in Microsoft's own Internet Explorer if it had been fed the same information."

When Microsoft reopened MSN to Opera users they said, "the experience may be slightly degraded, simply because (those browsers) don't support the standards we support closely, as far as the HTML standard in those browsers" are concerned.

Microsoft's hypocrisy:
They clearly took a swipe at Opera and other browsers as being less standards compliant. Yet earlier that same year, David Massy of Microsoft said that Microsoft's "position is very clear because a standard exists, that does not mean Microsoft will automatically implement it. Microsoft will implement appropriate standards that we believe are useful to our customers." This clearly shows Microsoft's hypocrisy when accusing Opera of not being 100% compliant. You also have to ask what they mean by "useful to our customers." Which customers are they talking about? Or did they mean shareholders? It seems pretty evident that the 'standard' that Microsoft designs for is Internet Explorer - the 'standard' web browser.

Microsoft is getting their just deserts:
Clearly, Microsoft is one of the companies most responsible for making it difficult for designers, coders, and QA people to deliver a simple cross-browser compatible HTML design. Now their MSN design problems (intentional or not) are being used by a small upstart competitor to make the folks at Microsoft look like heavy-handed, arrogant jerks who would rather screw up their user experience than let someone have a pleasant experience with at competing browser.

So where is the user is all this?
Users are left wondering why the web sucks. Wondering why they have to know so much about computers, web browsers, and upgrades; worrying if the next install of IE they try will go okay or if it'll bomb or mess anything up. Many computer users still see their desktop systems as fragile ecosystems that they'd rather not mess with. Because they didn't setup the technology to experience the technology. They hope to USE the technology to experience things: a more efficient business life, entertainment from new sources, critical information that somehow enriches their life. It's not about the damn technology! Technology should be about changing people's life experiences for the better.

I've been a happy IE user for a number of years (I was once a die-hard Netscape user, but they didn't keep up), but since reading about these shenanigans from MS, I've downloaded the latest versions of Opera, Netscape and Mozilla for personal use and have been taking another look at what browser I want to use in my day to day web use. Microsoft made me pause and wonder again why I was using their browser (which I'd been quite happy with). Attitudes matter.

Related Links:

• Opera's Press Release on The Bork edition of Opera 7.01 - explains their rationale.
• Opera FAQ: Why doesn't MSN work with Opera? - good explanation and detailed "evidence" as to what exactly MSN is doing differently for Opera users.
• Jakob Nielsen: Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003 - Jakob's added an update in February 2003 with comments about how accurate he thinks his predictions were in this article from early 1999.
• Microsoft Developer Network: Internet Explorer 6 and Standards
• W3C members fail standards test - "browser makers like Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and Apple and authoring tool producers, including Adobe Systems, Macromedia and Microsoft," remain noncompliant with W3C standards.

Can you design with your gut?
I found the discussion/comments on this Elegant Hack post - Good Gut so thought provoking I had to post my own 25 cents worth. How much do you trust your 'gut' when it comes to usability evaluations or design? Post your comments on Christina's site.

Web users' navigation behaviors changing and findings from testing search query formulation
A new StatMarket survey shows a couple of interesting trends:

- 64% of users now go directly where they want to go by typing in URLs and using bookmarks, while only 35% get there via surfing (just following links)
- Similar surveys done in February 2002 and 2001 showed surfing much higher - at 47% and 52% respectively.
- 13% of users arrived at a site via a search engine, up from 8 percent in 2002. So, while search engine referrals are growing, it's link-to-link navigation that is decreasing

Here are a few excerpts from an IDG article covering the survey results:

"Meandering is decreasing. This is a sign that the market is maturing," said Geoff Johnston, vice president of product management for the StatMarket division of WebSideStory Inc. which released the report Thursday.

While the Internet's cornucopia of information may have left Net users starry-eyed in the early days, users are now determined to get down to business rather than browse."

Not only is search engine use growing, people are getting better at using them, said Matthew Berk, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

Johnston ... comparing the Internet to TV. "After a while you get tired of flipping through the channels and just turn to the programs you like," he said."

Are users really better at searching?
I don't agree that with the statement that "people are getting better at using" search engines. My take is Google has improved the effectiveness of web search engines -- making even their competitors serve web searchers better by focusing on improving search algorithms and ranking methods. Maybe a very small percentage of web searchers have become more savvy about search query formulation or which engine to use, but I think it's more likely that the usability improvements made in search engines have accounted for users trusting them to meet their needs more often.

My experience shows that most users aren't very sophisticated in their approach to using search. For example, when usability testing an intranet site recently, we wanted to test how people would try to find the site on an internal search engine. We asked people to search for the site, knowing that it wasn't in the search engine's index. Our goals were two-fold:
1) see what query terms users would enter so they we could make sure those terms worked later, and
2) see how many different terms users would try before giving up.

The results amazed me. Many users totally gave up after just one or two search attempts, and no one made more than four search attempts. It was a very useful exercise - we ended up with a huge list of key query terms that we could focus on -- making sure those queries would find the site in the future. We also learned just how important first and second search result sets are, and that users will NOT be patient or successful with a poor search engine.

You might give that exercise a try on your next effort. You just have to reassure the test participant so they don't feel bad about not completing the task. We actually admitted to our participants right after that task that there was no way they wouldv'e found the site that day. We then explained why we set the test up that way, and how their struggle with different queries helped us. We also reassured them that there were no more 'trick' tasks like that in the study. This seemed to help them regain any lost confidence.

Related:
- StatMarket page covering the survey results (Note StatMarket links haven't been reliable in the past.)
- Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox - Search: Visible and Simple - note Jakob talks about observing how effective users are at query formulation.
- 37signals E-Commerce Search Report - a review of 25 online retailers' search engines that identifies 22 best practices.

Mad as hell
"It's as if the user interface folks have had their clocks flashing 12:00 for two full decades."
- TechWeb: Putting A Bad Interface On Things

Forrester: ERP Usability Sucks
Forrester analysts tried their hands at performing basic tasks in 11 different ERP software systems - you know, the systems that cost millions and millions of dollars. If you want to check out their findings, you can currently read a two-page brief on the Forrester site called "App User Interfaces Still Need Work" (if you register for guest access), and ZDNet has a short article on it as well which incorporates some additional quotes. Here are some excerpts and my take:

From the ZDNet article:
"Forrester analysts received no user training before testing the software. Companies typically invest in extensive training for their workers, spending between 10 percent and 15 percent of their project budgets on average, according to Forrester. However, the analysts tested what they thought of as "straightforward" tasks that shouldn't require training"

"Forrester receives many complaints from businesses about the poor design of ERP software, Orlov said. While such complaints aren't necessarily on the rise, Orlov said, in a depressed market for corporate applications, now is the time to improve the situation. "In a buyer's market, customers should be demanding better usability," Orlov said. The costs to businesses that use poorly designed software are huge, according to Orlov."

From the Forrester brief:
"While users invest trillions of dollars in enterprise software to supercharge productivity, boost customer satisfaction, and increase revenues, hard-to-use apps mean that users suffer decreased productivity and increased costs."

"Would anyone buy a Porsche if shifting gears required weeks of model-specific training and a lot of muscle? Just as shifting is basic in a sports car, so are these application-management tasks.

"Poor usability creates angry customers -- by driving up costs and squandering user productivity. To avoid this, vendors must perform scenario reviews on their apps and support Web sites. The next steps?
- Get outside help. Vendors should choose an accredited reviewer. The reviewer should follow a methodology focused on detailed design personas and perform lab and real-world testing.
- Prioritize fixes. Once problems are identified, vendors should prioritize based on importance to the user and the ease of fixing the issue."

My Prediction:
Until corporations learn to incorporate real usability measurements in their software evaluation processes, they will continue to buy expensive software that becomes shelfware, requires lots of additional training, and sucks productivity out of their businesses. Companies need to make usability a priority when talking to vendors: they need to ask when, how and if usability tests are conducted, they need to ask for test results (ideally reported by third parties), and they need to suggest that vendors add usability professionals to their staff. Until they do that, vendors will keep cranking out bloated featureware with horrible user experiences and steep learning curves.

How what we do compares to art and porn
I laughed out loud today reading this bit from Boxes and Arrows:

"Boxes and Arrows was born in 2002. We came into the world in March like a lion, and swore to write about “what we do” even though we couldn't agree what that was or what to call it. Like art or porn, we agreed we knew it when we saw it, and that was good enough. As the year unfolded, we discovered “it” was strategy and practice, design and evaluation, and most of all understanding and empathy for users and business. We definitely design, but we design more than just an interface or just a sitemap. We discovered we need a vast variety of skills to do our jobs well. And we need to do our jobs well to survive."

Christina has a great writing style and often makes me laugh while making an excellent point.

Do Not Reply to This Message Directly
Susan Weinschenk tells a good story of bad online banking customer service.

The Smart Money Behind Computer Aesthetics

A NewFactor Special Report talks about aesthetics and design -- I half expected Don Norman to be quoted in the article. Even though they didn't talk to Don, they did an excellent job of covering the topic. Don's trying to raise awareness of this fact within the HCI community with his upcoming book and recent talks.

Repeat after me, non-believing usability gurus, "beauty and style do matter to consumers and users." Can you say it? I knew you could.

"Dennis Boyle, a studio leader and principal of the IDEO industrial design firm, told NewsFactor that aesthetics becomes more important for many products as they mature. The first computers, like the first cars and airplanes, were functional and plain. "They start out with people just trying to make them work," said Boyle, who recently designed the Handspring Treo PDA and has worked on Palm, Apple, Dell, HP and other computers. "But eventually people don't care what's inside. They just want it to work well."

"Industrial designers are walking a fine line. As Boyle pointed out, "Aesthetics is just one of the plates spinning on the stick." Too little attention to aesthetics will alienate buyers. Too much attention can slow down the product cycle, delay introduction of performance improvements and add to products' cost."

Usability engineers are walking a parallel fine line. Yes, usability is just another spinning plate -- and yes, you can have 'too much usability.' As the saying goes, 'all things in moderation.'

Design blooper: Car park barrier

David Travis from System Concepts nicely illustrates a parking garage barrier design that gets "iterated" a number of times. He then aptly asks "how many participants would have been needed in a usability test to spot this blooper?" It's a great illustration of where usability testing would have been FAR cheaper than the resulting hacks to fix a bad design. In this example, the company who created the design is probably not the same company who bought it and was trying to fix it. Travis has also authored a new book called E-commerce Usability. Some sample chapters are available online.

since1968: Interview with Steve Krug

Marc Garrett has posted a nice, fresh interview with Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think. Marc avoids the boring, trite questions and asks some that I find more interesting like "Are you aware of any other Web books that have "Hatch, Sen. Orrin" as an index entry?" and "Are you a farmer or a cowman?" Reading this interview, I also learned that Croc O' Lyle is one of Steve's favorite sites. Needless to say, I'm flattered. Thanks Steve, you're too kind.

Here's my favorite quote:
"...it reminds me of a line from an underground comic called The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from back in the 1970's: "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope." Having a small budget and someone on the project with clout who really cares about whether users have a good experience--which is often the case with an amateur site--will often get you much farther than a big budget and no one guiding the whole thing."

Usability and Open Source Software

A paper from the University of Waikato, New Zealand does a great job of discussing at length some of the causes of poor usability of Open Source Software (OSS). I got this link from a developer-type cohort. He keeps trying to convince me to help bring usability to the OSS community. The paper does a good job of explaining why that just doesn't sound like fun to me.

One of the core problems:
"The OSS approach fails for end user usability because there are 'the wrong kind of eyeballs' looking at, but failing to see, usability issues. In some ways the relatively new problem with OSS usability reflects the earlier problem with commercial systems development: initially the bulk of applications were designed by computing experts for other computing experts, but over time an increasing proportion of systems development was aimed at non-experts and usability problems became more prominent. The transition to non-expert applications in OSS products is following a similar trajectory, just a few years later."

I question whether OSS will eventually follow the same trajectory - after all, the market drove commercial software to take that trajectory. The "market" for OSS is rather different. The author talks about OSS developers being incented to "scratch a personal itch" -- that and recognition are how they get "paid" to a large extent.

"The 'personal itch' motivation creates a significant difference between open source and commercial software development. Commercial systems development is usually about solving the needs of another group of users. The incentive is to make money by selling software to customers, often customers who are prepared to pay precisely because they do not have the development skills themselves."

Finally, how many usability folks would want to dive into this for the "public good"?
"Open source draws its origins and strength from a hacker culture (O'Reilly, 1999). This culture can be extremely welcoming to other hackers, comfortably spanning nations, organisations and time zones via the Internet. However it may be less welcoming to non-hackers. Good usability design draws from a variety of different intellectual cultures including but not limited to psychology, sociology, graphic design and even theatre studies. Multidisciplinary design teams can be very effective, but require particular skills to initiate and sustain. As a result, existing OSS teams may just lack the skills to solve usability problems and even the skills to bring in 'outsiders' to help. The stereotypes of low hacker social skills are not to be taken as gospel, but the sustaining of distributed multidisciplinary design teams is not trivial."

Working on a project with no clear leadership, ill-defined roles, consensus-based decision making, and a bunch of developers who have no desire to listen to a "usability expert" -- yikes, I'd rather swim with a bunch of lawyers...er I mean sharks...Okay, same thing.

Related posts:
- Confessions of a Mozillian
- Linux needs focus not whiners
- Open Letter to a Power User / Developer

New Data Leaves No Doubt about Why CRM Results Disappoint

A good article on CRM Guru talks about customer-centricity and how it's key to success in the marketplace. The author's "curmudgeon" tone also makes for a good read. Note too the case study at the end of the article.

"But the excruciating pain, the generator of post-traumatic planning disorder, is that developing customer-centric strategies requires us to trade in our "inspirational" and "creative" planning methods (read "short, sweet and dry") for time-consuming, boring, sweaty, stinky trudging through data looking for win-win opportunities with customers. Opportunities that don't sit up on the surface waiting to be seen but only appear to those willing to muck around in customer input and information long enough to find what competitors have not found—profitable strategies hidden beyond the reach of inspiration and strategic "brainstorms" and first obvious conclusions. Hell, just take me behind the barn and shoot me."

Users Begin to Demand Software Usability Tests
Computerworld talks about the Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports as well as a how some customers are viewing usability as a requirement when purchasing products.

"Boeing played a lead role in the development of CIF after its experience and internal studies showed that usability played a significant role in total cost of ownership. In one pilot of the CIF standard on a widely deployed productivity application, the Chicago-based company said improved product usability had a cost benefit of about $45 million."

Ugh
Sorry for the lack of posting this month - lots going on...

Personal Writing Goal for the Day

Avoid TextSmell. Methinks this sometimes is a smelly blog. I promise I'll work on changing that. Thoughts?