I think a lot of people have seen this:

And it certainly has been written about at length, even over at oreillynet.com. So what do I have to add to the conversation. Well I'd like to talk about how this can be viewed through the lense of good user interface designs and the decisions you make when creating a new one.

Your Opinion Is Irrelevant

The young lady's opinion at the begining of the video is a perfect illustration of bias. Essentially it illustrates one of the great product management mantras, "Your opinion is interesting but irrelevent." By the end of the video clip you find out that her initial opinion was completely false.

Get the data before you make any decisions.

Morse code is a great illustration of a design choice. Here we have a method that speeds up the transmission of text across the wire (or wireless).  The choice is around user education.  Current phone texting takes virtually zero training, morse code takes more.

Even if Morse code is A LOT faster, in a cost benefit analysis it still probably makes sense to use the current standard UI.  Although it might be interesting for some phone manufacturer to try it out.  For some reason it sounds right up Blackberry's aisle to me...

Links:
Pocket Morse 1.3
Morse Coder 1.7

Update: Well hopefully the replaced video will stay live for a bit. But nevertheless I did find something else that is interesting during my search for a replacement. Check out this:

Notice the keybooad sitting next to it? It's our old friend Steampunk Keyboard Dude, better known as Jake. Check out the project page: telegraph

I hope you have found this stupendous product. It proves two things at once. One, that not everything under the sun has been invented and two that we have a cleanliness obsession in this country.

Clorox came out with a great product: [linky].

But I had one gripe with it...when you pulled out a wipe oftentimes the wipe would tear the way it was supposed to but it would leave the next wipe inside the container. This entailed one of two solutions, you had to reach throught the little tear hole and try and pull out the next wipe or you had to open the whole conainer and restring it through from the bottom.

That sucked. It hurt to stick your finger through the little tear hole. It seemed the easier solution but it wasn't.

Now Clorox being a good company listened to its customers and/or did some extensive product testing realized that this was a "bug" in their product that should be addressed. And they did.

The tear hole now has a little hinge opening. It's the neatest little thing and completely removes the pain-in-the-ass-ness of their previous version of the product.

1. Dangit! The next wipe is inside the container.

2. No problem I'll just reach inside that little hinge thingy and pull it out.

3. Easy as pie.

Great example of a company introducing a product and then improving the design after release to eliminate existing issues.

Huzzah! Clorox. (I just wanted to say Huzzah!)