Just about everyone who uses a digital device has heard of "Moore's Law"–– "the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every year." The number of circuits that were crammed on to a circuit back in 1965, when Moore came up with his law, was 50 –– today, that number is approaching one billion. That exponential growth has made the whole digital revolution possible.

At about the same time, another computer pioneer named Calvin Moorer came up with an interesting law of his own. His law stated: "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it."

According to Peter Morville, Mooers' Law becomes more relevant with every advance of Moore's Law.

As we're inundated with a flood of information and data, our ability to cope with and use it becomes severely compromised. How many of us have given up trying to program that VCR or other new digital marvel with its 300 page manual? Technology moves much faster than evolution.

Moores' Law points to the conflict between what's possible and what people really want. It's this cognitive friction that's made usability, user experience and user centered design a vital part of the design process. Since it's World Usability Day, this might be an appropriate time and place to step back and think about how we can help reduce that friction.

CreativeTechs Craig Swanson led us through our second session of "Blog Your Portfolio" at the School of Visual Concepts, here in Seattle. Craig and Larry Asher, the SVC director did a stellar job helping the three of us in this experimental class actually get our blogs up and running.

Not satisfied with using the default templates included with Blogger and Wordpress, I've made a lot more work for myself trying to modify the look of the templates - getting into the CSS and tweaking in Dreamweaver. Lots to learn.

Larry gave us a good presentation on writing for the web, citing Jakob Nielsen, who was here in Seattle recently with User Experience 2006, and some of his own work as the creative director for Worker Bees. Craig suggested this MarsEdit software as a way to loosen up and not worry about writing the great American Novel on your blog. As usual, it's not working very well out of the box. Is it me, the software, the server, or sunspots. Who knows? I've e-mailed tech support and hope to have an answer soon. My workaround so far, has been to write in the MarsEdit window, which is like a simple e-mail program window, copy and paste into the Blogger "create a post" window, then publish. It really was easier to write that way.

Great article by Dan Saffer, from Adaptive Path, attempting to bridge the gap between how designers and developers try to communicate. As as one trained and practicing visual design since the days of stat cameras and Rubylith (not Ruby-on-Rails), the article is a great reminder of the same problems, different generation. It's all about being able to communicate across disciplines - trying to understand the other side. The tools have gotten pretty complex, however. Working the CSS code on this blog template gives me a greater understanding and appreciation of what developers do all day. I find coding at my baby-steps level is full of mystery and trepidation, especially when I can't see that I've left out an all important semicolon and nothing works. Someday, maybe I too will be able to say "code is poetry".

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