Hundreds of Billions of Extra Keystrokes

Why do billions of people have to type "www." before the domain name of every site they access? Isn't it obvious that, if they're typing the address into a web browser, that they're interested in the World Wide Web service (and not, for example, FTP or SSH)? These 4 characters may be trivial to each individual Web user during the course of a day, but if we pool together the entire Web-using population of the world, and measure the total person-hours lost in entering 4 extra keystrokes for each site they visit, the number would be mind-boggling.

The history
In the past, there were individual servers for each service, and DNS-based load-balancing and other advanced techniques were not invented yet, so it was prudent to have one server dedicated to serving WWW requests. It gained the obvious subdomain of "www". But here we are, in 2007, still shackled to having to type these extra characters every time.

What you can do to help fix the problem
If you're reading this, and own a website (or have considerable influence over such things), please try and get your website to respond to requests addressed to yourdomain.com in addition to www.yourdomain.com. It is an easy DNS-level and web-server level configuration change that your sysadmin can perform within minutes, and none of your application code needs to be changed. In addition, you can help communicate the change to your users by removing the "www." from all hyperlinks, marketing and promotional material, and wherever else the "www." prefix used to appear.

Save the world ...
... from these shady characters! ;)

How Much Blue is Too Much Blue?

Apple fans love Aqua, the visual theme for the Mac OS X user interface. The color blue is omnipresent on the Mac, on scrollbars, buttons, menu selections, progress bars, and in many other widgets. That lends a certain consistency to the user interface (if you ignore the brushed metal anomalies in apps such as Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).

They went one step further in the blue-ification of the user interface, and added liberal amounts of blue to most of the icons of the default applications. Thus, we get something like the screenshot below:

The problem is obvious: the similarity in all these icons slows you down when switching from one application to another. Because they all look alike, users need to spend a moment or two to make sure they're selecting the correct app. If each icon had a unique color, the color difference would act as a redundant encoding in addition to the shape and appearance of the icon. This can significantly enhance response time, as has been shown in human factors research.

While consistency is desirable for widgets, it is the opposite case for application icons.