Talking to a friend of mine, I’m reminded of one of the things that makes me the saddest about a lot of companies. They’re losing the struggle.

I think we all have the struggle inside of us. Its the fight against the voice in our head that says what we have now is “good enough.” If you listen to that voice you eventually die.

I dunno about you, but I try my hardest to tell the voice where to go stick it. There so much room for improvement in everything we do, it’s just really sad and pathetic if we let ourselves settle for “barely there.”

So, if you’re just treading water (as a company or an individual) I strongly encourage you to shake things up. Put that fancy stuff into your web site, even if it means a slight delay. Take the time to do that project you started right.

Because, seriously… lose the struggle and it’s only a matter of time.

… photoblogging software sucks hot ass.

Maybe I’ll make that one of my self-assigned projects during downtime. Might be a while tho.

A recent Reuters article reports on a study that says complexity of the product causes 50% of product returns.

Something to think about before you add that “one nice little feature”. What you’re really adding is complexity and there’s a usability cost for that. Does the benefit (to your users, not you) outweigh the cost?

Andy Rutledge over at UX Magazine has a good rant on why sucky web sites that are successful still suck.

Examples he points to are Google, eBay and Boingboing. I don’t read Boingboing, but I’m a user of both Google and eBay and I can attest that they do both completely suck when it comes to UI.

Google is clean. Yes, we get it. But you could present a lot more information and still keep the search function front and center. Then maybe, just maybe, I’d use something like the Google personalized home page. Problem is, it’s ugly. Try it. It looks circa 1996 crappy-ass web site. GMail isn’t much better. Gmail works cool. But it’s like the Edsel of webmail apps. Sure it runs great, but good lord it’s got a face that looks like it fell outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Like he says in the article, Craigslist is well-designed “undesign”. Google is just badly designed. The search results pages are pretty crappy as well. A lot could be done to make the SERPs much more user-friendly. Like not throwing all the info for the result into one gobble-de-gook mess of a paragraph.

eBay is the same way. For all the experimentation they do with their UI, you’d think they’d get it right eventually. But no… And tell me again why I have to LOG IN to get to see completed auctions? Come on… let’s get with the 2.0 guys!

So, let’s stop letting commercial success promote bad design. Just because a sucky web site’s business model doesn’t suck doesn’t mean we should copy them Beavis.

The tendency in business today is to over-plan everything. Between the 8.2 metric tons of paper and the endless meetings, we forget about the fact that while we’re planning nothing gets done.

Jason at Signal vs. Noise (37signals’ weblog about… well just about anything) talks about how they got months into planning their affiliate program for BaseCamp when they decided to simplify and just launch it.

The result is, they launched a simpler affiliate program in 1 week.

So, today I took the PDPWorks survey for my employer. The spiel is it’s going to tell me what my inner and outer selves are like and uncover everything from my leadership style to what color underwear looks best on me… (kidding about the underwear thing).

In any case, I tend to view these psychological thingymajigs with some degree of skepticism.

Well, at the end of asking you to rate a bunch of atttributes about how you view yourself and how you think others view you (or something like that), this thing spits out a long report that has a bunch of nifty graphs. The weird part?

It’s pretty damn accurate.

Some of the things it said:

• I’m dominant.
• I like people and being around them
• I communicate fluently and succinctly
• I’m driven and I like to pull people along with me
• I get really frustrated when process seems to get in the way of progress

And a lot more… but that’s the gist. It also says I should be successful at what I choose to do.

Maybe it’s time to work on Big Max…