I'm absolutely loving some of Harry Brignull's recent posts: clear, authentic writing, drawing on experiences from real projects. Why don't more people write like this?

Pop over to this one, which talks about the design process for the iPad edition of The Week:

"It tanked bigtime. Suddenly I realised that usability testing is only fun when it rips apart someone else’s work! When you’ve spent weeks selling the idea to your client’s stakeholders, it’s pretty depressing.

Looking back on it, we made the classic architect’s mistake of designing for a fictitious user behaviour that only existed in our heads."

I think there's still a tradition of businesses not admitting to their mistakes; maybe there's a fear around legal liability or admissions of negligence underpinning this, maybe it's ego.

I felt I had to pretend everything was perfect during the early years of FP, and I like the fact that this is changing: that organisations like MDHub exist to let business owners discuss failures and problems with each other behind closed doors; that some people and companies openly take a philosophy that "if you're not failing occasionally, you're playing it too safe"; and that there's even a conference where failure stories are showcased for us all to learn from. More of this, please.

(Oh, and whilst I have your attention here's another tasty treat, via Alex G: the ancestors of GPS).