Fat Agnus

Imaging one of these two scenarios

• You are asked to make a demo that will be presented to the management or client.
• You have a great idea for a new design for your old application and want to present it to your boss.

Whatever scenario you choose you will now be faced with a dilemma. If you choose to make a dazzling and beautiful mock-up the people you present it for will expect it to be almost good as done. If you on the other hand make a very rough sketch they will believe that you aren`t doing you job as well as you should. But if you don`t make it look presentable enough, they might not get the idea, which you are trying to get across. You can almost get a headache just thinking about all the possible constellation on what people will think about the demo you show them.

The issue here is that people don`t realize how much work there has to be put into making an application. The interface alone takes about 10-20% of the total work that has to be done - it is almost like an iceberg.

Whenever I’involved in creating an interface/demo, I always trying to find some sort of middle ground so it doesn`t look like it is completely done nor like a crappy and sketchy solution. I also strongly explain that what I`m showing is just a prototype and that there is still much work to do (depending on the solution you come up with of cause).

Sometimes it will be someone from the sales department that will show of the prototype to the client or perhaps even your (non technical) boss that will present it for the upper management and if this is the case, then it is really important that you think about how finished the prototype should look like. Especially salesmen have a tendency to butter the client and over sell the prototype and how much time it will take to finish it, just so they can make the sale. This is bad on so many levels, one of the consequences could be that you don`t make the deadline and will make you look bad.

So think really hard about how done your design, demo or what it should look like before it gets presented.

A novice will usually blame the equipment and show distrust where an expert on the other hand will understand the equipment and know its limit and believe it to be reliable and predictable.

An industrial designer once described to me how he viewed ordinary equipment such as car doors and radios. Earlier in his career, he would feel irritation when he encountered something that was poorly designed. Eventually he learned enough about how thing were manufactured to appreciate the reason for poor design. He did not excuse the designs but had reached a point where he could look at most common appliances and devices, recognize the mechanisms inside them, and imagine how the design engineers had chosen to have the equipment constructed.

- Gary Klein (Sources of Power - How people make decisions)

In my article “Information design is the new black” I mentioned how important the UTF-8 is, but for some strange reason (only god knows why), Hotmail doesn`t support UTF-8. If you send a mail to someone with a hotmail account in that format, then Hotmail will say “hey, we don`t care; we will display it in another way“. They won`t even convert the damn thing, so if you live in a country with characters that only apply to your language, then the mail will end up looking rather ridiculous.

What seems even more strange is that Gmail and Yahoo actually support UTF-8, so why wont Hotmail?