Misc Posts

Jack brightened up our busy Friday afternoon with this gem.

You can check out Unlikely Friendships on amazon.

While creating a new google group I was directed to the newly formed group page. I was pleasantly greeted by a warning and disclaimer that a feature that I have yet to use will be deprecated in a few months.

I wonder if it would have taken them much more time to add some logic to only display this if a) the group has used this functionality and b) it’s not a brand new group.

Additionally, if I click on the “Download Pages” link… my browser happily downloads a zip file, which contains an empty index.txt file.

…it’s unfortunate that they’re deprecating this useful functionality.

While wrapping up an iteration for a client, the team was caught testing out one of the new video chat features.

Back in March I signed up for an account on Venmo because people said it was going to be a game changer. I thought I’d give it a go and planned to take a second look when time permitted. I haven’t found the time, but since signing up my only other experience with them has been a weekly email to remind me that:

• I have received no money
• I have sent no money
• I have no friends
• I am not active
• I need to make these emails stop showing up… but who has the time?

I don’t mind that status emails like this get sent out, but in this scenario.. it’s just not valuable. Is it necessary to communicate that nothing has happened?¹ To be fair, Venmo is in beta and is working out the kinks. They are far from the only service that does this, they just happen to be the one that triggered this post (which I will be pointing them to). :-)

There’s a ton of information being sent to people’s inboxes every day. When we decide to communicate with our users, we should be mindful of the value of the information as well as how and when we ask for their attention. Is the email useful? Is it actionable? Or is it just undesired noise?

¹ Context is fundamental here. If you’re a sales manager and your sales team has had zero sales… this might be valuable information.

Our healthcare provider’s employer web interface for making online payments is using the latest in web technology…

My favorite is that the, “Macintosh Platform can not support the site” versus… they haven’t taken the time to support the Macintosh platform.

While attempting to pay my cable internet bill… I found myself faced with Comcast’s sign in screen. I can’t help but wonder how much effort went into branding their sign in process with mySIGN-IN. Does their online account system really need a branded name (that you then have to explain what it is?) when they could probably suffice with, “Sign into your Comcast online account.” Not only that, someone had to design the graphics. Someone(s) had to approve the lower case “my” and the all-caps SIGN-IN. I’m baffled. The end-result? I wasn’t able to sign in with my email and password… and am now waiting for them to send me a PIN via snail-mail, which is something I’ll write about another time.

From an exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry

After taking a short break over the holiday season, we’re planning to start recording new episodes of the Planet Argon Podcast.

If you have any topics ideas, please let us know.