I cannot agree with you about Facebook’s interface, though. To me it is another example of an early goer: the first big thing in the genre to hit the market and for free. Their early interface was unpredictible, features were arranged in an unintuitive manner, no hierarchy, no cue. People just had this incredible urge to get back in touch with their long-forgotten mates from kindergarden.

For example: how predictive is it that when you’re consulting someone’s profile and then you click on the “friends” tab, you get back to your own list of friends? How usable is that? Navigation is consistent, all right! But I cannot use my knowledge of navigating my own content to the purpose of navigating someone else’s. I cannot build my experience on my early learnings, I have to learn some other ways to do just the same thing: that IS unconsistency at work.

I can go on and on on facebook, but that’s neither the point, nor worth it.

Anyway, informationarchitects.jp makes a great contribution to the design community and thanks for that.

If you watch BK’s Whopper Virgins documentary, the simplicity is also cultural. Quite a few didn’t know how to eat it, or pick it up.

Watching it made me think, these people aren’t used to stuffing food in their mouths. And exporting the burger concept suddenly seems like such a barbaric act.

And unrelated, a true Starbucks customer story: Me: “Cafe Latte please” Clerk: confused “A plain latte?”

To the clerk’s defense, the store was in Christopher Street, NY.

I’ve also started to order my coffee “medium” size in Starbucks, most of the greenshirts can decode that.

Your article really made me think about brands in a different way.

Thanks.