You like it. It likes you.

MY HESITATION in starting a blog was mainly this: What the heck do I lead with? Doesn't it have to be something profound, insightful, worth chiseling into my epitaph?

But since I accomplished little more than rambling in my first post, the pressure's off. So...since I make a living as a user-experience expert, my second post should have something to do with my Philosophy of Design, or good "UX," or some such  buzzword which most of you, dear readers, will neither understand nor care about.

But wait a sec. You do care about good user experiences; you may just not know it yet.

Incredibly Useful Invention.

But first, a quick detour into theory. In grad school we were taught that good design is useful, usable, and desirable. But personally, I think you mainly need to focus on the first two, and the third will follow. (YouTube being a notable exception: it's just plain fun and addictive. Like America's Funniest Home Videos.)

ON THE WHOLE, though, I lean toward utility over sexiness. (In design, of course.) Thus, pondering utility of web sites and various inanimate objects around my house, as I am wont to do, I'd lump them into one of three categories:

1. LOVE YOU:
NextBus. If you rely on an unreliable transit system (like ours) where you could be waiting 5 minutes or 55 minutes for a bus, this is the NextBestThing to someone driving you straight home. Why wait in the cold and fog when you have time for another drink?

Oooooh

OpenTable. A city-dwelling foodie's dream. No more calling 10 places to get a reservation or scratching your head trying to remember, "Now where to eat in that neighborhood?" Zagat's meets personal concierge meets GPS (almost).

Farecast. As a freak who searches every travel and airline site to find the very best deal, I think this site just added 3 years to my life. It not only does all that work for me; it's also a crystal ball into the future trends of fare prices. Magic, I tell you.

Wikipedia. A brilliant experiment in self-policing, mosh-pit publishing. OK, so maybe we can't trust everything we read...but when you want a quick summary of a topic without toiling through the first 10 Google hits, why start anywhere else? Plus, a random article link--good times, good times.

Amazon Wish Lists. If you can train your families, as we have, to look here first for gift ideas, you'll never get another leg lamp for Christmas.

FRA-GI-LÉ

RadioParadise. Not strictly a "UX" item; just freakin awesome Internet radio. You know the kind of station you can leave on all day without wanting to change the channel or throw something at the radio? Well it doesn't exist. Until now. Too bad Congress is about to ruin yet another great thing about the '00s. ... On the utility front, I have "one-click" purchased many a song before it's even finished playing.

2. HATE YOU:
Flash sites. Gotta wait for the download; usually over-designed; often so hyper-interactive you want to unplug the monitor and bash the head of the marketing executive who signed off on it. All too often they cough while you're trying to navigate. Or they have a FlashFart. And the site needs a Skip Intro button, well then there's almost no hope of salvation. Have we learned nothing from Craig?
[Update: in the interest of full disclosure I should confess that the Sheraton example above is in fact coded not in Flash but JavaScript. But that's almost as irksome...and I can't bring myself to give up my trademarkable pejorative, FlashFart.]

Our microwave. Every time you have to reset the clock, it forces you to enter the date and year. Does my Boca Burger need to know the year?? Might make sense if it changed itself for Daylight Saving Time, but A) it doesn't; and B) it'd be wrong anyway now that Congress changed the calendar. Just stupid.

Yelp. Started out in Love You, but now it just frustrates. I'm sure direct democracy seemed like a good idea at the time, but when you get 100 wildly divergent opinions (half of them bitchy people to start with), who can you trust? My kingdom for just one competent reviewer to rise above the pack. Remember the old CitySearch? (sigh)
[Update 4/5: OK, the ultimate in hypocrisy--tonight I posted my first Yelp review. But I swear it was only to help lower the rating of a crazy restauranteur who, we just learned, is about to force out my favorite pub in town. Sign the petition!]

[Update 11/11: To no avail: Le Barleycorn est mort.]

Links that don't open in a new tab or window when you're in the middle of reading something. (Ahem, Team Vox...)


3. LOVE TO HATE YOU:
Our bootleg TiVo. For Christmas we finally got a TiVo. Well, not a real TiVo, but a Toshiba knock-off. Love that it has a DVD burner built in, and the TV Guide listings are free (though you get what you don't pay for). But we've learned to use the thing completely in spite of itself. Absolutely the most cryptic, over-engineered consumer product I've ever picked up a remote for. Hoping Panasonic's are better for next time.

Hate the game, not the playuh

ING Direct. I feel almost guilty for shifting money from our little credit union to these corporate greedsters...but the account setup was so damned smooth, I couldn't help myself. The designers must have locked up their lawyers in a room, because even their legalese is in plain, chatty English. Plus, even a regular savings account makes almost 5%. Who can say no?

The Netflix Queue. The sole reason we keep our underused Netflix account. If I could transfer its (currently 306) titles directly to my brain, then I wouldn't need to stand around the video store like an Alzheimer's victim, and end up bringing home something which I realize, 30 minutes into it, I've already seen. Until that day, Vivat Queue.

Grace Cathedral's webcasts. Being a choirboy since age 5, I used to be a semi-regular churchgoer. But with a top-notch men & boys' choir brought directly into my living room--and the ability to fast-forward through the sermon if circuitous--I now all too often have devolved into an armchair, Internet Episcopalian. This fault I acknowledge and bewail.

The Macintosh. There, I've said it. Yeah, I'm a lifelong loyalist and have owned 3 of them...but it's the tiny, unjustifiable differences that make one want to yank out one's one-button mouse and wrap it around Steve Jobs' neck. They're still sexier; they're still not Microsoft...but come on, not even a true Delete key after all these years? Throw us a frickin' bone here.

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Here endeth today's rant.