Daniel Hardy

A while back I came up with an idea to create a site for memorials.  A lot of people create pages or even myspace profiles when they loose a loved one.  It is a great way for friends and family to share their memories and post pictures.  I remember sitting around with several friends and explaining the idea to everyone.  At the time everyone thought I was crazy to consider monetizing tragedy.

It appears that I am not the only one who thought of this and in fact, someone acted upon it.  Take a look at OurMemoryOf.com.  This is a great idea and I believe it can bring some joy to people in their darkest hours as well as be profitable.  Beyond that they have a great design.

They did take a little different approach than I would have.  They are going to charge for their services where as I would have tried to go a different route for funding the service.  Either way I think it is a great idea and look forward to seeing how well it works.

Just goes to show that when you get a great idea you need to act on it fast

Due to my Uber nerd status I probably review more documentation than most people.   I have a sick and twisted love of teaching my self new things which means I spend a lot of time reading obscure documentation.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time reading documentation for PHP, MySQL, JQuery, and Adobe AIR.  As I have been pouring over pages and pages of information I have started thinking about documentation’s place in the user experience.

Documentation’s impact on the user experience is often not directly talked about.  When asked, most UX practitioners would probably agree that it is part of the almighty user experience but if pushed further I think you might find that they rarely consider it (assuming they aren’t directly responsible for it).

The problem with this is that when a user turns to documentation for help, the experience has already been compromised.  This means that documentation is the last line of defense, a last opportunity to save the user experience and ultimately save a customer.

So what makes good documentation? Unfortunately I am not qualified to give a complete answer of what “good” documentation is.  I do know that documentation that is incorrect is probably the worst thing that can happen.  If a user is told to do something it better work for them.  If there is a possibility that it won’t work, they should be notified of why it won’t work and more importantly how they can tell if they fall into the “won’t work” category.

One feature I have found to be “good” is user comments presented with the article.  Often I read an article and miss some key component or have questions of how it applies to my situation.  If it is a popular documentation center it isn’t uncommon to find someone else answering my question somewhere in the comments.  A great example of this can be found all over the PHP documentation.

There is a lot more to documentation than meets the eye and its impact on the user expeirence is probably more substantial than most UX practitioners believe.  I have heard things like “If I do my job they(documentation team) will be out of a job”.  This is a foolish and dangerous view.  Even in the best scenario some users will need to read about it to understand it.

Everyday it seems like I hear about another company pushing a new Open Source agenda. Today Download Squad had a great article about Reddit going opensource.

This is an amazing step for a web site.  To my knowledge no other popular site has opened their codebase on this level.  Sure there are lots that have open API’s but this is a very very different thing than letting someone access your data through a cloaked application layer.

Instantly closed source proponents have deemed this an ill fated move on the basis that anyone can now read the rating algorithm and there by diminish the sites value by “gaming” the system.  I disagree whole heartedly with this idea.  Sure people will try to deconstruct the algorithm and utilize it for their nefarious agendas but the community will respond quickly by writing a better algorithm.

A great example of this principal can be seen with Linux.  Every piece of code in the operating system is available to anyone who wants it yet it continues to be the most secure operating system out there.  Perhaps Firefox is a better example as it hits close to home and has a large user base(according to the W3schools.com it has almost 40% market share ).  Again anyone can review the code and find exploits.  This happens all the time but because there are 100’s of eyes reviewing the code these exploits are fixed almost immediately by the community.

Overall I think this is a great move on Reddit’s part.  I also believe we will continue to see a large increase in the number of organizations deciding that Open Source is a viable business model.

This one came across my reader today and is definitely worth sharing. If anyone is feeling particularly generous don’t hesitate to drop ship a set to me to match my logo.