On Fitts's Law and "muscle load"

In 1954, a chap called Paul Fitts came up with an equation to express the ease of pointing to or touching an object. In essence, he stated that this metric was a function of the distance to the target and the width of the target.

This is another example where work done more than half a century ago has direct relevance to many of the things we do today - especially in the area of user experience.

On a Y2k18 Bug - School boy error or sadistic API?

Being and older developer, I remember all the fuss about the Y2K bug.  For the younger readers, shortly before the millennium, there was huge panic that mankind would suffer enormous catastrophe as we moved from the year 1999 to 2000.  The cause of this concern was the short-sighted way some computer programs had been storing dates.  We had been using a couple of numbers to store the year - like 77 for 1977 and 85 for 1985.  Developers of that early software had made the assumption that their programs would not be running by 1999 and therefore thinking about numbers greater than 99 (1999) was not required.

On the extremes of radical new management (part 2)

Over the last 20 years, I've seen a few management masterstrokes, particularly in senior management, and without being privy to the discussions that led to them, I have on occasion tried to rationalise the oddity with possible explanations - here are some of my thoughts.

Being Radical
Often, when a new person is brought into a senior managerial role, the company is looking for change - typically a big change - because they believe that something is fundamentally wrong.  Companies get stuck in a rut when the culture stagnates around existing or historical dogma.  They think they need a big culture shock / kick up the backside to get things back on track, and who better to give this high risk strategy to than....