You need to be careful about what you promise—especially when you make a promise on social media.

This adage is ringing loud and clear for Toronto-based Timothy’s Coffee. In an effort last month to grow its Facebook fan base, the company ran a promotion saying that anyone who “liked” its page would receive four free 24-pack boxes of single-serve coffee. As the Toronto Star reports, this was rather generous, as these boxes retail for over $17 CAD each.

A contest aggregating site picked up the promotion and, as you can imagine, responses poured in, reports the Star. Problem is, the stock of product was depleted within three days of the launch, yet Timothy’s still sent emails telling people their coffee was on the way.

The best part? This is an EPIC WIN! for Timothy’s Coffee’s interactive agency, since a promotion so successful that it makes headlines is AWESOME! It’ll be in all the presentations from here on out.

As always, you have to remember that the little numbers on the screen match up with numbers somewhere else in real life. And your application can be one hundred percent consistent with itself, but if its business rules and limits do not align with the real life it represents, it’s a worthless application.

(Link seen via tweet, but I forget whose. Sorry.)

That one is classic. And ongoing on oh so many sites that try to use their insecure templates on their secured Web pages.

Fortunately, they did not have anyone testing the WOPR. I mean, seriously, number of players zero? Anyone reading this blog would have caught that and made them fix it, and blammo, nuclear war.

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Your organization does realize that these are written communications akin to actual documentation, doesn’t it?

Oh, who are we kidding, of course they don’t. They leave it to developers to jot something down here and expect it will never be seen.

Why don’t you snoop around and see how it’s done? At the very least, it will make you look busy. At the very best, you can help further mask how functionally illiterate many of your co-workers are (or cover better that things are not written by native language speakers).

Just a quick note of thanks for your recent comments concerning iPad use by seniors. I just gave my 88 year old Dad an iPad (original, WIFI only) for his birthday, in an effort to replace his aging & very limited WebTV. Success beyond all expectations! He very quickly mastered the basics of email, browsing, and YouTube videos….

In the second decade of the 21st Century, this gentleman was using WebTV to access the Internet.

I mentioned it in passing in the latest Two Minute QAte, but WebTV users still exist. You need to remember that people, especially people who don’t work with computers all day, use outdated technologies that you probably gave up eight years ago, and you must account for these people in your planning. Even if this accounting is merely deciding you won’t support them.

Although it would be nice if you’d programmatically let them know that, too, before they’re using their rotary phones to reach out and touch your customer service representatives.

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You see, they “solve” the “real estate” problem of having a month comprise parts of six discrete weeks not by putting the final couple days on the bottom row with the preceding week, but by wrapping them to the top. You know, where you would not look for them because that’s the past. But the solution solves their problem.

When your designers break the mold and try to do something different, something that’s never been done before because now they have THE TECHNOLOGY to do it differently or merely because they’re just interns fresh from the second decade of the 21st century’s college of design pablum in their heads, you have to consider: Will my users understand this? Does it make their experience better? Or is it just something my designers want to do.

That leads me into some of my pet peeves:

• Placing the control labels into the controls. Especially irksome when I tab into the control and the label disappears.
• Reversing the normal button order of alert or confirm boxes. I hate when it’s Cancel/OK or No/Yes. Yes, I understand Macintosh has always done it that way, but it’s not the way I understand it. If I’m only half paying attention, which I usually am because I’m paying more attention to the all-woman Iron Maiden tribute band playing in the background, I’m going to do it wrong. Your application should be helping to keep me from messing up.
• Fields that are out of common order. You’ve seen forms where the Confirm Password edit box is not right after the password edit box or where the fields in an address are out of order. Okay, these are not so much design decisions, but sloppy oversights caught with no QA.

Bottom line: If you’re going to break out of the traditional metaphors your user has experienced for years or decades, you’d better make sure your application is doing it for your user’s sake, not for the bragging rights your designers will get for doing something outrageous or extreme.

At the RISK of REPEATING MYSELF to an entirely DEAF DUMB AND STUPID — THOUGH APPARENTLY NOT BLIND BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO HAVE THEIR FRICKING VIDEOS DON’T THEY — internet, I will say this again:

NOT EVERYONE ON THE PLANET HAS A TEN-THOUSAND DOLLAR COMPUTER WITH 75 TERABYTES OF RAM AND A HARD DRIVE CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE SPACE SHUTTLE NOR DO THEY HAVE A SCREAMING FAST INTERNET CONNECTION CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING PURE THOUGHT TO OTHER GALAXIES IN UNDER A NANOSECOND. SO FUCKING TRIM YOUR WEBSITES, OR IF YOU ARE THE “WATCH THIS KEWL VIDEO HURR HURR” LINKERS, WARN OTHERS OF THOSE FUCKERS SO WE WON’T BOTHER TO CLICK AND HAVE OUR BROWSERS CRASH AND SEE THAT STUPID “YADDAWARE CRASHED, WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY MICROSOFT” THING ON THEIR DESKTOP.

If you’re building 3-d Flash immersive environments to sell cat food, more often than not, you’re trying too hard. Don’t only think of what all you can do with your high-end Macintoshes there in the office. Remember, Roberta is out there, limping along on a low end Windows XP box and trying to get a coupon to save her fifty cents on her next purchase of her product. If she can get it.

Neither do the people behind the MyFox channels’ Web sites like MyFoxPhilly or MyFoxNY:

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Remember, those meta things show up a lot of places. People see it in search results, social networking site summaries, RSS, and so on. If you’re misspelling something or dumping a null in it, that’s gonna leave its mark.

Would it hurt you to view source now and then? I think not.

In Big, the hit movie from the late 1980s, star Tom Hanks rises from a clerk in data processing—that’s what technology was called back then—to become vice president of product development for a toy company. That quantum leap in status and pay took him all of a week to pull off. Some would-be fast-trackers might call that the ideal job rotation.

Some companies have always encouraged ambitious employees to rotate out of their discipline—technology, finance, marketing, operations, etc.—and into a different department, often one in which they’d have to push themselves to succeed.

The rationale is simple: By seeing how other areas of the company operate—getting the proverbial big picture—an employee becomes more valuable, and the organization as a whole gains. Six to 18 months in a new assignment arms an employee with additional knowledge and layers of skills.

That career advice is more geared to people in big corporations who aren’t in tech jobs but managerial or other non-tech components (business analysts, project managers). Nobody is going to take a technical writer and try him out in QA, for example, or give him 18 months to taste development. However, rotation is important to keep your peeps, especially your QA bunnies, from burning out.

Let me explain. No, there is too much.

One of the shortest postings in my career came when I was put on a QA team on a long deathmarch of a multimillion (and I mean two) and multiyear (and I mean like four) project to develop a custom piece of software for a client. I joined the team some months in, when they had a mostly working Java desktop application (perish the thought! because the application surely perished). I started testing an area of it and tearing it up. The client didn’t like this, didn’t like that, wanted more of that, and altered the specs so that my employer had to change it. I spent nine months essentially testing the same features of the same application and often logging the same issues when I left.

Don’t do that to your testers. Let them see different things, different projects. If you swap them around, they get more experience with the gestalt of the application/business/et cetera as well as learn new techniques, technologies, and music fitting for QA when they work with different people.

Security experts, industry analysts and even Microsoft recommend that IT departments upgrade Internet Explorer 6, yet new research shows that while there may have recently been a mock funeral for the aging browser, IE6 is still around and doing well, especially during standard business hours.

Chitika, a search-based online advertising network, conducted a study recently to learn the hour-by-hour market share of some of the leading Internet browsers. The study showed that IE6 ranked fourth among all browsers, grabbing 13% of usage during what many consider peak business hours.

I’m about to go into a project where I pressed the client to get a list of its client’s browser requirements beforehand. Shockingly, to them, the ultimate client used IE6. So I’ve pressed the development team to look at it in IE6 before turning it over to me for testing. If all goes according to prophecy, and by “prophecy” I mean the way it usually goes, they won’t, and I’ll have to load the defect tracker with IE 6 issues.

Just because Google said IE 6 was dead does not make it true.

(Link seen on Andrew Richards‘s Twitter feed.)