Here's an interesting quote I came across today:

Usability is not everything.

If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. Joel Spolsky

Actually I'd disagree ... Whether you design a website or a night club or a door handle, you have to consider your target users / audience.

There is a misconception about User Experience Design that if you religiously follow "best practices" you're going to design a great product. That is not true.

In some situations you'll get lucky and it might just work, but ultimately you need to understand what your users are trying to achieve in using, consuming or visiting your product.

If it is ordering a book onlinem then that's one thing. If they want to have a good time and their definition of a good time could be loud music, alcohol and dancing, then a lot of night clubs will cater for that.

But you can take this further. Think about the really popular clubs. Usually they provide something that their revelers want, whether it's a particular location, music, decor etc.

Ultimately someone sat down and thought hard about what people would like about their club, what others do not offer and then created it. Usually this spawns a lot of copy cats, but without a real understanding what they're copying they won't attract the same crowds.

So good club designers would exactly the same way as good user experience designers.

Now that would be a gig I'd be interested in doing!

Incidentally, here's an interesting article about the difference between copying and stealing design.

It's early in the morning and I need to my caffeine fix. Until I've had my latte any brain functionality will be severly hampered.

Staggering into "insert name of evil capitalist, exploitative coffee chain corporation" I slurr my order at the barrista. Please note, slurring is early morning induced, but could occasionally come from the hangover due to a this-week-day-is-the-new-friday party out (it seemed like a good idea at the time).

It's fascinating that the barrista understands my order despite the lack of spoken coherence. This is similar to cab drivers who somehow manage to extract your home address from your drunken attempts at understandable speech.

Armed with said caffeine dosis, I venture back to the bus stop that will take me to my final workplace destination, where the pretence of efficiency shall continue.

In the bus is where the universe's law of physics somehow are thrown into a blender because when it comes to my coffee, gravity doesn't seem to apply anymore.

Every bump the bus takes, and it seems the bus driver is actually aiming for them, manages to somehow create a coffee burst even through the tiny lid opening that's supposed to keep the whole coffee experience civilised.

But I'm so desperate for my morning fix that I'll just suckle on the coffee, just hoping that any resulting burns will not lead to permanent lip damage. After all, I can't even sue "insert name of evil capitalist, exploitative coffee chain corporation" for damages as we are in Europe.

By the time I reach my destination at least half the coffee has found its way onto my clothes.

What the heck, brown is the new black anyway ...

People taking to the streets and standing up for their right to vote, now that's a sign.

It's a sign of a country that has seen it's fair share of oppression, while claiming to have fair elections, that is ready for change. Now it's time to put words into action and let the people have their say.

Of course, even if the reformist Mousavi would get into office, no one has any illusions that there would be a new dawn with a country freed from the clutches of a supreme leader. But it might be a first step in the right direction. At least the recount of the disputed votes gives a glimmer of hope that something might change.

Another four years of Ahmadinejad certainly won't make the country or the world any better off.

Inspired by Stephen Fry's letter

You know what?

Life is better when you're older!

Hard to believe isn't it?

Less acne to start with! You have an income to spend (which is never enough) and you don't have to pretend to be older to impress girls. Actually quite the opposite.

But most importantly, a lot less insecurities about yourself!

That's not to say that you won't have any, of course you will. But you'll get better at dealing with them; most of the times anyway.

With hindsight, should you do anything differently?

Not really.

Everything you're about to experience, the good and the bad, will make you the person that I am right now. And I don't think I'm doing too badly.

Still, remember, the people that hurt you in the past generally end up being much bigger losers than they ever accused you of being. And I know because I've seen some of them.

You will get your heart broken. Badly.

But that's OK because it'll also show you how deeply you can love someone, which is the most wonderful emotion in the entire universe. And it's worth living just for that.

Believe in yourself! Ultimately you're in charge of your own destiny and no one will take responsibility for it but you.

Thank god tight trousers will only be a phase. You'll end up speaking fluent French and live in Paris for a bit.

You'll even learn and enjoy to dance properly!

Despite significant ups and downs, you'll be ok. I know how it turns out ...

At some point of time it hits you.

It could happen early, late and for some it never happens at all. And more often than not when it does, we deny it and pretend it never happened.

It's the realisation that you're actually an adult now.

Though what does it really mean to be an adult / grown up?

I remember as a kid I used to think being adult manifests itself most obviously in wearing boring clothes (suits, shirts, trousers and sensible shoes). After all that's what my parents look(ed) like and my parents are of course the epitomy of being grown up because ... well ... they are my parents.

But then at various times in the past I asked myself "So when am I going to be grown up? I mean reallygrown up."

Was it when I left my home to go study at university?

When I had my first job?

When I had my heart broken properly for the first time? (though you can experience that as a teenager too)

When I graduated?

There are so many rites of passage that we could consider being a sign of having grown up, but then you still find yourself doing certain things that you did as a teenager / or dress like one (and think it's cool). Yet there are many things that we've learned are maybe not such a good idea to be repeated, which is an essential part of growing up too.

Ultimately, it probably doesn't come down one particular moment when you realise that that's it, you're an adult now!. There are individual pieces of our personality that make us grown up in certain areas and infantile in others.

I still wear trainers and t-shirts, and love the following joke:

What kind of bees make milk?

Boobiiiiiieeeees!!!!

Generally people don't like change.

A sweeping statement, I know, but I fall into that category too (more often than I'd like to admit).

Humans, just like animals, are creatures of habit. We get used to something we like (sometimes even something we don't like) and when a change of that habit looms, we curl up in despair, crying "But why?".

I should be used to change. Or rather I am used to it.

I travel for work a lot, change projects every couple of months and I've live in a few countries and cities. So change does come quite naturally to me, but I do have to admit that once I get into certain habits I sometimes find it hard to let go of them. Whether that's restaurants, shops, clothes etc.

One place that is constantly changing and should be is the internet. Websites change their look and feel every couple of years, they introduce new features and generally users scream that the old was better.

Facebook is a particularly good example of that. The social networking site has evolved significantly from its first form of simple connected profile pages to the lets-share-and-document-our-entire-lives site it has become now.

So when it introduced the latest changes to its functionality, which turned its newsfeed into something more of a twitter-esque "who's doing what RIGHT NOW" source of information, users cried again that they wanted the old version back.

But they've done that before. Users have always come out in hordes saying how much they hate the new layout, but in the end they got on with and used to it and in the end quite like it. The introduction of the newsfeed in 2006 is probably the best example of that.

What they learned from that backlash is informing users of the upcoming changes and soliciting their feedback might actually be a good idea.

They did that for the last change when there was a significant front end overhaul, but not this time, which is strange.

Again, with all the people protesting right now, sooner or later people will just get on with it.

But it is interesting to note that if change is managed gradually, the transition is still bumpy, but a lot less rocky than if you go for the big bang approach.

To men it's a mystery.

Even to women it's a mystery!

Countless music, poems and novels have been written about it and still, no one's quite sure about it:

What turns on women? What fuels their desires?

Any woman reading this now will throw up her arms in the air and exclaim in shock

"But no, I DO know what I want! I want this, this and this ..."

But if you asked two ladies who have just thrown up their arms to compare what they want, they'd probably be astonished about the gaping differences.

And that's exactly the issue! Different women want different things and what turns on one woman, has no effect or might even be a turn off for another.

Why's that?

Nobody quite knows, but they sure as hell are trying to find out!

Scientits are now actually doing studies where they compare subjective and objective arousal (yes, there's ways of measuring objective arousal in women!) and with women there are interesting results (quelle surprise!).

Women are actually turned on by a much wider variety of stimuli than men.

Gentlemen, the good news is that a lot of women are turned on by other women (even though they don't admit it).

The bad news is that there's no sure way that will work on every woman.

What's very well documented is that it's far more of a mental thing for women than for men. But that's good news too because it explains why very attractive women often go for less attractive men (and it's not just the ones with mountains of cash).

Another interesting fact they found is that in desire being a mental thing for women, one key aspect creating arousal is "being desired". Again, in one way no real surprises there. Women like to be found pretty! But that it's a turn on for them? Now that's news!

One resulting theory therefore is that the reason why women's sex drive in steady long term relationships deteriorates over time is that they don't feel as desired compared to when their partners were courting them.

This, of course, is in stark contrast to the well known courting technique of reverse psychology, whereby the less you're interested in your object of desire, the more she will try to get your attention. I suppose the ultimate aim is to make you desire her, although she doesn't have to know that you did right from the start.

Still, so far they've only been scratching the surface of what's lurking in this deep ocean of unexplained female desire and scientists concede that they might never find out all of it.

Why?

Because women are just too complicated!

And that's why we love them ...

Sex education has always been a contentious subject.

Religious conservatives have been preaching for the longest time that the media is destroying our youth and poisoning their minds with sexually explicit and violent lyrics, films and computer games.

Now researchers at Pittburgh University found a link between teenagers' sexual and music listening habits.

"They found those who regularly listened to music with explicit and aggressive sexual phrases were twice as likely to be having sex."

I can already hear those favouring abstinence and chastity shouting "We told you so!".

But is it really that simple?

The attempt to censor explicit music has failed and rightly so. In a free country you should be able to produce and buy music, explicit or not as long as it does not promote racial hatred.

So the alternative would be to promote abstinence and just ignore that nasty business of sex.

Unfortunately, promoting abstinence does not work.

Kids will be bombarded by nudity, sexual innuendo and talk, images and videos of sex from an early age. How long you can and should protect from it until they are capable of making a sound judgement on it is another matter.

But it is a matter that should not be ignored by the educational system because more often than not, schools are not just there to feed the minds of young people with science and factual knowledge, but also to prepare them for life out there in the real world.

And sex is a very important part of that.

It isn't so much about the how you do it, which is more of a question of trial and error; but rather it's a question of the facts associated with it. The consequences, both physical and emotional.

Youngsters should know what really gets a girl pregnant and what doesn't. Equally they should know about sexually transmitted diseases and how to protect from them.

Ignoring teenage pregnancies and high levels of STDs among youngsters and preaching that not doing it is a better solution is not going to stop them or even reduce the number of those becoming sexually active.

Kids will always want to rebel, cave into peer pressure or simply be curious about what it's like.

The least we can do as adults is tell them that it's not what they show in porn or sing about in abusive, explicit music.

We should tell them that making love when you're ready for it and with the right person is a wonderful thing. In doing so we might help them make the right judgement on when the time is right.