Rob Millard and Anecdote point us to — dare I say — a beautiful representation of complex systems thinking: The Art of Complex Problem Solving.

(For full enjoyment, mouse over the bullet point list in the upper left corner of the page.)

Kathy Sierra says that things become more usable when they’re fun. I totally agree.

Let me put it this way. More often than not, some of my best technical work – I’m talking high-degree-of-difficulty statistical analysis work performed with my “A” game – received merely “nice work” comments when delivered in a “professional” (translation: sterile) report. On the other hand, I’ve heard “WOW!” most often when I’ve taken results from a moderate-degree-of-
difficulty analysis and delivered it in an interesting – and sometimes entertaining – fashion. More importantly, I’ve had more fun on those projects.

If the city of Bryan TX can bring life to a typically boring water quality report (here is their latest), you should ask yourself next time you walk into the office: Can consuming a spreadsheet be fun? A technical document? And wouldn’t it be fun to make those things fun?

Listen to Kathy: “Never underestimate the power of fun.”

Godin brings up a good point here: What customer wants to be told to “kick back, have a look around, and stay awhile” when they’re probably looking to fix a problem with one of your products?

I love Apple. Their products are all about simplicity and usability — in other words, great design. Those themes should permeate everything they do — especially their support site.

Goes to show that even the best companies can improve their game.

Update
Another mis-step by Apple: Apple snubs its open source geeks. Infoworld’s Tom Yager: “[B]reaking a promise, and saying nothing about it, matters. It’s not about the code. It’s about character.”

Danah Boyd is a PhD student at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She delivered a talk at the O’Reilly Etech conference earlier this month titled “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide.”

Two concepts in the rough crib for the actual talk I found particularly interesting:
1. embedded observation
2. design for reinterpretation

Here’s a paragraph on each (thanks to Kathy Sierra for the link):

The designers of [Craigslist, Flickr and MySpace] are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of “flow” to use Cziksentmihalyi’s term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use. If you design for perfection, you will be disappointed in what people do. Design conscientiously but plan to react immediately after something goes out.