A lot of usability-wise low-end software is still giving us dialogues saying things like Attempting to log in, Login successful.

To attempt something is to perform a task with a substantial probability of failing.

You attempt starting a new business, climbing a mountain or hitting the waste basked from across the room.

You don’t attempt pouring coffee, unlocking a door or ordering pizza, those are things you just do. In the unlikely and rare event that you do fail, so be it. It may fail but it’s never expected.

Attempting an everyday task, to me signals extremely low expectations and ambition.

When you are successful in something it usually means that there is some level of achievement.

You can be successful in starting a new business, climbing a mountain or hitting the waste basked from across the room.

You can’t really be successful in pouring coffee, unlocking a door or ordering pizza. Those are thing you just do.

It’s even more obvious in the full sentences “I attempted starting a new business and was successful.” versus “I attempted pouring a cup of coffee and was successful”.

If your waiter said “I will attempt to place you order with the kitchen, Sir” and then came back very excited saying “I succeeded!” Wouldn’t you start to wonder about the quality of the food? I’d probably reply “I will attempt to give a tip, let’s hope I’m successful.”

When using words like attempt and successful in this manner you are sending a subconscious signal to the user that the system is poor and unreliable and that even the simplest tasks are difficult and often fail.

They’re simply not an efficient way to convey information.

An HTML e-mail has the following drawbacks

• Most e-mail clients don’t load the images without the user’s consent. So not only is the visual design gone. The message is also preceded by a warning message “To help protect your privacy, some content in this message has been blocked. If you are sure that this message is from a trusted sender and you want to re-enable the blocked features, click here.“Quite an introduction, yes?
• It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to read on my iPhone, and pretty much any handheld device. So it goes straight into the trash.
• Printing it usually produces a very poor result.
• If it has a dark background and I forward it to my friends, the text I write will be barely visible, since my text is usually black by default.
• Since the first impression is that it looks like an ad, many people will hit the delete button without even reading the headline.
• The body text, containing the actual message is often not in focus, since visual attention is drawn to all the decorative graphics.

And the following advantages

• The people who send them think they look nice.

And another thing, if your email needs to be prefaced with with “If you are having difficulty viewing this email, please read click here.” then you need to find a better format.

The obvious reason is of course that Microsoft wants to force people to upgrade to the latest version of Word.

The solution is, of course, to save text documents in a format that all word processors can read.

That format is RTF, developed by Microsoft (ironically).

From Wikipedia:

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.

Every word processor known to man (or at least to me) can save and open any RTF document.

Word format does of course offer features unsupported by RTF, the most commonly used being tables, images, headers and footers, but more often than not, you aren’t using any of those features.

If you need the features of Word format, make a habit of saving as an older version of Word. You’d be surprised how many features you never even knew were in Word 98. An many more users will be able to open them.

This good habit of whenever possible saving text as RTF, has never failed me once, since I began in 1994.

RTF documents created with Word 5.1 for the Mac from 1993 do still today open with any word processor on any platform I’ve ever tried.

And the next time someone sends you a document with the latest Word 2010 .docxz9 format, simply reply:

This file format is not supported by my computer and many others. Please save the document as Rich Text Format (RTF) and resend. That way all recipients can open it.

Here are my best tips to make the process a bit smoother

Exactly, how will the software help you?
Never mind what it can do.
There’s a multitude of software with endless features that are just too complicated to use or even find, Microsoft Outlook for example.
Never mind what it does, if it’s not what you need.

Don’t be impressed by long feature lists
Unless you know beforehand what features you want, don’t be blinded by long feature lists.
While a feature list gives you an idea of the software’s capabilties, it says absolutely nothing about how easy or fast it is to use, or learn to use.

Look at screenshots
If you can look at a screenshot and easily identify where you are in the process, and what you can do there, that’s a very good sign.
It it feels like a blur of information, and you have to read every word on the screen, in order to understand, that’s a bad sign.
Software that looks good and is easy on the eyes, is usually good. Not always, but usually.

Read what the reviewers are writing, not just the grade the give.
People rate software on different criteria, and sometimes even on criteria not related to the software.
Why is the software good or bad according to the reviewers?
Do they use the software like you intend to?

If you need it, it pays to pay
There’s a lot of great free software, but don’t hesitate to spend money on software, if you belive it will really help you.
Consider what it would be worth if it:
- Saves you 10 hours a year. 50 hrs, 100 hrs?
- Gets you, or helps you keep, one new client. 3 clients, 10 clients?.
I see many people using free, inferior software, impeding their productivity for years on end, just to save $29.95.

I made an approximate calculation of how much time you could save by increasing your typing speed.   It’s based on 45 full 5-day workweeks per year and and hour of pure typing per day. In reality many of us work and type more than that, and also type outside work, so these figures are probably pretty low.

There’s plenty of software to help you learn to type faster. I use aTypeTrainer4Mac myself, and I would definitely recommend it to all Mac users. A great app which amazingly is freeware.

More software tips, especially for Windows, are welcome in the comments.

Simply: this has to be good.

Buy The Power of Less from Amazon

Without any statistics to support my claim, I assume that a men’s lounge in a women’s store must be good for business.

Instead of dragging my feet behind her, sighing in dismay as my shopping fatigue sets in, causing her to feel stressed and compelled to leave, I can sit down in the men’s lounge, and relax. She can calmly browse and shop as much as she wants without feeling any stress or pressure whatsoever. So that’s all good. But…

The men’s lounges I see are far from ultimate. With a few improvements they could become key to attracting customers.

Here’s a list of features the ultimate men’s lounge might have.

Comfortable seating
Men’s magazines
Cell phone coverage (place the lounge where coverage is good)
Coffee
TV set with discovery channel or other guy stuff.
Wireless internet access

If you do this right, shop owners, you might find women browsing your merchendise longer than they intended because their man isn’t ready to leave yet.

The solution is ridiculously simple: write the tags in your documents.

Since both Mac OS and Windows search features support searching inside documents it will find the words. Regardless on which platform and in which application the document was created (provided it’s on of the standard text document types) it will searchable in any environment.

When I have a miscellaneous note of some kind, with no obvious place or category, and I’m not sure I’ll find it where I put it – I just add some extra tag words at the end of the document. For clarification and consistency i preface the words with “tags: ”

As with all tags I include related words not in the text already as well as alternate spelling of names.

Like this:

On Main street in Venice, a few blocks south of Hollister, there’s a great breakfast place called the Omelette Parlor. My friend Scott brought me there in September 2007.

tags: lunch pancakes omelettes omelet omlets venice beach parlour los angeles santa monica

It’s definitely not a new idea, but it’s not utilized often enough.

Colors make a lot more sense than letters or numbers since colors usually elicit an emotional response, making them easier to remember. Also, colors do not require you to know how to read. 

If you’ve forgotten where you parked, your three-year-old kid can help you remember on which color you parked. With letters that’s unlikely to happen.

So, let’s use those otherwise pointless moments to get a little exercise, in the form of calf raises.

And we do it like this:

• While holding on to the handrail you step back so that only the front of your feet are on the step.
• Then gently raise yourself up and down. (If you feel people are staring at you for bobbing up and down, you can just do really slow raises, and no one will notice. )
• If you’ve had a long ride and feel your calves are warmed up, you can easily stretch them by just relaxing in the bottom position, letting your body weight do the work.

More on calf raises at Wikihow: wikihow.com/Do-Calf-Raises-Correctly