I bought Tetris for my iPod Touch today, but it keeps crashing before I can actually play it. I reported a problem through the App Store, and was rewarded with this gem of a dialog box:

I just went to the Dell website to look something up, and was rewarded by this incredible bit of sleuthery on the part of Dell’s crack team of internet designers:

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

The web designers didn’t indicate if my being in Canada somehow altered the behaviour of the website, or if the selections were somehow tuned to my location. Just to brag that they were clever enough to detect where I’m located. It might have been more useful to have the message read something like “You are currently viewing the Canadian Dell Store.” It’s a little less braggish, as opposed to “Dude! We TOTALLY located your IP address! We are teh kool! You’re in CANADA. Dude…”

Holy. Crap. If there is any reason to avoid software designed by this group of people, it’s likely this slide:

Now, I’m really not trying to slag the fine folks at Fisher Price Toys, but man, this presentation (and WinXP, and other MS stuff) simply has to have been born at the toy company, rather than the largest/most mature software company on the planet.

I mean - can they fit any more information into the slide? Perhaps, if they use more colours, or fonts, or sizes of fonts. Compare that to a Stevenote, with the simple yet powerful elegance. This is the difference between the Windows Media Center Edition remote, and the Front Row remote - 800 buttons vs 6.

I’d like to assume that for a Big Keynote Presentation, that a company would pull out all stops and design the best presentation they possibly could. If that assumption holds, then MS can’t do any better than that. That’s scary.

Mike Evangelist at Writer’s Block Live tells it better - and he should know, since he was involved with Apple product marketing and Stevenotes.

Compare with a sample Stevenote slide:

Photo by olebra

Update: Just cracked open my latest National Geographic, and it’s running a full-page ad from MS Canada - the insanely busy super-cool ad. You know the ones, with 6 fonts, 10 font sizes, busy DNA double helices spiraling out of a window embedded in a boy’s chest, with green birds and blue elk and astronauts and butterflies and dinosaurs and flowers and fish and text that is askew at all kinds of funky-cool angles. The ads that look like they are designed by programmers, and are so cluttered and busy that you’re not really sure what the message is? Yeah… At least their advertising is consistent with the keynote presentation announcing Windows Live.

Update: Graham pointed out that I was being an insensitive ass with a reference I’d intended to be a throw-away comment, but hadn’t thought through the ramifications of what I’d said. I was insensitive and clumsy by using the reference (my words, not Graham’s), and I apologize to anyone that may have been offended by it. The reference has been modified, and actually reads better now as well. Think. Before. Clicking. Save. Dumbass.

So, Jakob Nielsen is at it again, with a list of The Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes. Surprisingly, this blog does relatively well at avoiding the stuff he’s pointing out. I could be linking posts together better - I’ve been relying on tags/categories/”related entries” to do that automagically, since links will likely break if I change blog software sometime in the distant future. However, more explicit links would be a Good Thing™.

Other than that, I suppose I should update my “about” page with an actual photo, rather than the cheezy South Park avatar.

And I will continue to mix topics, thank you very much. This blog is my outboard brain first and foremost, and as long as I have more than one topic rolling around in my skull, there will be more than one topic mixed together here.