Kill me

Last night, I went to a great talk with a funny title by Janice Fraser. Lean UX design is an emerging concept that incorporates high-quality, high-velocity UX design into agile development processes.

“Kill Your Darlings” implores us to not fall in love with our designs — or even assume they’re good — until we’ve properly validated them. Rather, the UX design must go through rapid cycles of prove-improve as you dial-in to what actually works in the real world.

Janice’s presentation is on Slideshare, for the curious. Unfortunately, you won’t get all her great commentary, which is why you should see her speak if you can. Even better, sign up for one of her workshops.

A more team-focused article + presentation is by Tim McCoy at Cooper.com.

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With Facebook’s new Open Graph initiative, they’ve made it easy for me to stick Like buttons all over my personal Web site, too. When you click one, a little man will carry your display of approval through some tubes to the Facebook, whereupon a trained monkey transcriptionist will bang away at a typewriter until something makes sense, finally sneaking into my house late at night to glue your message to the inside of my monitor.

Amazing stuff. Get your Like on.

Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances.

So would waging war be considered a “serious purpose”?

New York Times: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Apparently the Pentagon didn’t get the memo on chart junk. Good times!

Further reading: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

It’s available here: http://github.com/subtleGradient/Java-Velocity.tmbundle

“An eBay company”, it says. They have to be pretty legit, right? Well, I thought so.

Security Problems

Today, doing some tune-ups for the client, I happened to notice that their store login page is susceptible to a really easy Javascript injection attack, or XSS attack, or whatever teh hax0rs are calling it now. I’m no hacking pro, but this is Web security 101. Actually, it’s remedial Web security. To have that kind of vulnerability on an e-commerce site is awful, and on an eBay-branded site, is downright embarrassing.

So to the layperson, all of this this means a customer could easily get duped and have their info swiped, and perhaps their:

• store wrecked
• merchant account hijacked
• customers’ personal data stolen

Deal-breaker!

Clueless Support

When I called their support today, the poor girl on the phone had no idea what I meant when I asked if my ProStores account could be hosted on a subdomain of an existing domain, i.e. store.awesome-company.com. (This is not a highly technical question in the hosting world). I had to explain everything to her about five times and the resolution was to file a ticket. No, the advanced support guy she had just conferred with was not available to talk to me. Like, duh.

And if you were wondering, oh wayward Internet traveler: it turns out you can’t host your Prostores site on a subdomain. It’s a pretty common, useful feature; this, too, is a deal-breaker, ladies. Ess that dee.

View Bike Ride from downtown to UCSB in a larger map

Click on the end point and see all the nice data.