Remember in elementary school (if you're a girl) there was usually some big fight going on about who was "best friends" with whom? It used to get so bad--us girls wanting to both single out one of our friends as special, but not wanting to hurt other girls' feelings--that we created new categories: good friend, best friend, best best friend, and the whammy: best best BEST friend.

Well, now that we old people have invaded Facebook--and people are using the site not only for personal social netw...
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Over the years, I've seen (and worked on) a lot of e-commerce, ranging from the huge (multi-retailer aggregated stores; custom implementations for multimillion dollar companies; etc.) to the small (nonprofits who need simple donation systems; small wholesalers or retailers who need a simple way to get their products online) and everything in between. And one thing I've noticed about all of these implementations is that the same issues always come up, regardless of the size of the effort or th...
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In my last post, I talked about the four pillars of good technology:

• Useful
• Purposeful
• Accessible
• Usable

(A note: Technology needn't be computer-related, though these days it often is; technology in this post is defined by our use of tools of any kind. When you're evaluating computer tech solutions, it's often helpful to compare them to other technologies we don't even think of as tech--you know, the wheel? doorknobs? your car?)

It might be easy to confuse "useful" with "usable" but the two concept...
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