net.wars: Orphans in a storm

The modern usability movement as it applies to computer software and hardware design began in 1988 when Donald Norman published The Design of Everyday Things. Norman, as he's patiently retold many times since, was inspired to write that book by six frustrating months in England, where he was constantly maddened because nothing, not even light switches, worked logically. His most recent book, Living with Complexity, looked at the design of complex systems, trying to pinpoint how to make the services we navigate every day less frustrating.[more...]

It's very difficult to gauge the progress of the EU's attempt to reform the data protection directive, whose text is due to be agreed by the end of this year. Basically, it comes down to the difficulty of understanding what is going on in EU government at any given time. There seems to be more than 4,000 amendments (not exaggerating), an endless succession of committee votes, and little way to understand their order of precedence. Couple that general confusion over the EU's legislative process with the fact that a Mad Man trying his hardest could not have come with a term that sounded less engaging, and you have a subject that fights to get mainstream press attention.[more...]