Teradome.

I woke up early to blog today.

These days, my internet usage has changed dramatically. Thanks to parenthood, work and other responsibilities, internet is no longer a thing like television that I hop on to only to see what’s new. Most of the time, I’m trying to get stuff done.

Generally speaking, the people I know who get web usability the least miss this point. To them the web is an infinite playground where all experiences are possible. That’s not a bad thing, trust me — that how our famed rate of innovation keeps up — It’s just when folks with that opinion intersect with the need to build a banking or prescription drug or similarly important site where people are trying to get important stuff done.

I get that I’m getting old. There are video games I avoid because they’ve placed save points a hour apart from each other, and often I only get 20 minutes scattered around to play. The number of albums I buy has dropped since I only get minutes, not hours, to surf music blogs and sample new tracks. These things haven’t gone away, and I plan to keep doing them until the day I die. They just need to be done faster that before.

When I see a flash-bang interactive murder mystery website for a technology or even a potato chip brand, I see the ultimate expression of design for youth: heightened entertainment for people with loads of disposable time. It’s certainly not talking to me, not if they’ve omitted the necessary — the way to get things done.

The worst reaction I’d ever heard about needing to offer an additional quick-access method to content is that it would allow users to skip the big animated experience we’d created and not have them see all the great work and branding that came with it. My reply was a nicer variation of “yeah, but why does the site exist?”, although I wanted to say something snarky about masturbation. No coupon or sales sheet should ever be exclusively hidden behind extensive animation.

If the big experience helps get what needs to be done done: an demo of a benefit to edify, a tool to assist a complex transaction, a visualization to browse massive stores of data, etc., then there really should be no limit to what you can do. That should be exciting, useful, and “fun for all ages.”