Me: “We did some research that indicates that the registration may have run out. Your organization registered and managed the domain name, so I can’t help with this since we have no involvement in managing the domain name.”

Client: “[very angry] I am reading your email in disbelief. You are the webmaster – how can there be an aspect of our website that you have no control over?”

Why is that client from hell? Because they don’t understand the relationship between domain name registration and site functionality? Because they called the webmaster when there was a problem with the website?

Sites like these, while good for the occasional laugh, only contribute to web professionals’ image as aloof, arrogant, know-it-alls. If clients don’t know how this stuff works, it’s not their fault.

On a positive note, Michael Beirut’s talk about great clients is inspiring:

2010/01 Michael Bierut from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

I’ve seen dozens of sites like this over the years and my reaction is always the same: after the initial luls die down, I can’t help but wonder if the joke’s on me, the Professional Web Designer. These sites satisfy a need.

But if the milk jug is any indication, some of the changes will take getting used to on the part of consumers. Many spill milk when first using the new jugs.

“When we brought in the new milk, we were asking for feedback,” said Heather Mayo, vice president for merchandising at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart. “And they’re saying, ‘Why’s it in a square jug? Why’s it different? I want the same milk. What happened to my old milk?’ ”

Mary Tilton tried to educate the public a few days ago as she stood at a Sam’s Club in North Canton, about 50 miles south of Cleveland, luring shoppers with chocolate chip cookies and milk as she showed them how to pour from the new jugs.

“Just tilt it slowly and pour slowly,” Ms. Tilton said to passing customers as she talked about the jugs’ environmental benefits and cost savings. Instead of picking up the jug, as most people tend to do, she kept it on a table and gently tipped it toward a cup.

Will consumers learn how to pour “correctly” with the new milk jugs or will popular demand force Wal-Mart to go return to traditional milk containers? My guess is that the new jugs are here to stay, spills and all. Unwieldy product design typically doesn’t deter people from purchasing basic commodities (well… salad dressing, at least).

That said, what a strange mix of brilliant business-centered design and poor consumer-centered design! Someone obviously did their homework on the milk supply chain and discovered keys to making the whole process cheaper and more efficient for everyone involved. However, the lack of consumer research into something as basic as “is the jug easy to pour?” is hard to forgive.

View images of the new milk jug here and here.

Postscript: if you know who designed the new jug, post it in the comments!

I was struck by how unaware most people are of some of the most popular internet sites and services. Look for the giant ? symbol:

• WordPress
• TechCrunch
• Flickr
• Gawker

It’s a great reminder to any web designer that you are not the user, meaning the patterns, conventions, and brands we’re most familiar with online are still foreign to many people, your users included.

(Thanks to Scott for the tip.)

On imagining Steve Ballmer embracing Firefox 3:

But it’s also a nice little “thought exercise.” It is impossible to imagine Ballmer acting with this kind of initiative, imaginative or vision. (I’m not suggesting that what Briggs proposes is a good idea. Only that it is hard to imagine Ballmer ever acting with this scale and dynamism.) It is impossible to imagine Ballmer advocating a position that would make consumers “the big winners.”

That Microsoft bull in the china shop (This Blog Sits at the)

I remember reading about Apple engaging in a similar process before they opened their first brick and mortar Apple store. I like competitive analyses that go outside the domain for inspiration:

The airline studied theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see how they handled similar situations. Then, the team built mock-ups in a warehouse using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts in order to find ways to increase efficiency.

Alaska Airlines saves millions by rethinking check-in flow (37signals, makers of Packcamp)

(For those outside of NYC, the Hudson Yards is a large piece of undeveloped property in Hell’s Kitchen (or “Midtown West”), basically the last large piece of undeveloped property in Manhattan. As you might guess, it’s valuable. The Metropolitan Transit Authority owns the property and has been shopping around the development rights for some time.)

From the article:

Equally unsettling is how the project fits into the surrounding urban fabric. The towers loom over the High Line, forming a colossal barrier against the Chelsea neighborhood to the south. (Allowing 11th Avenue to run through the site will lessen the effect slightly, but not much.) Arranging the towers along an east-west axis — a break from the traditional Manhattan grid — is only apt to reinforce the site’s image as an introverted corporate enclave.

This seems to suit the transportation authority’s agenda just fine: it always has been more interested in how much money it could make off the site than in the impact that the development would have on New York. The city could build at much lower density without spending a penny of taxpayer money.

I’m surprised at the indignation here. It can’t possibly come as a surprise to an architecture critic that a developer would sell to the highest bidder. I honestly have no idea whether the MTA–a quasi-governmental agency, I guess?–has any responsibility to be publicly beneficent with the land it owns.

Let’s assume for a moment, though, that the MTA is responsible for championing the public good as Ouroussoff suggests. Surely physical architecture is not the only criteria by which we judge an organization’s contribution to the public good. Many G train riders would happily trade several acres of “miserably depressing” architecture in the already miserably depressing midtown Manhattan if it meant the MTA provided more frequent service and full-time connections to working class neighborhoods in Queens.

I am over-simplifying, to be sure, but so is Ouroussoff. The breathless article about the conflict between private profit and public good has been written before. Only a fool would believe that New York City landowners have a cut-and-dried choice between the public good and “hustling for money.”

10 Insights From 11 Months Of Working At Google | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s blog and book are must-reads for anyone interested in web analytics.

Steve Jobs gives a legendary keynote at Macworld SF every January, launching products and giving a state of the union view of things at Apple. I wondered what effect the Jobs keynote had on Apple’s (AAPL) stock price in the short term. What if you invested $10,000 the day before the keynote, then sold at the end of the keynote day?

Keynote Index Fund

Episode 9 of House, available nowhere.

Before I get into G train improvements, though, let’s look at the insights we’ve gained so far about the seven lines for which we have survey data:

• No train has received a rider grade higher than a C, and none lower than a C-. Hmm. OK.
• The L, 4, 5, and 7 trains are overcrowded. Phoenix is hot in the summer.
• The J/Z takes too long to show up. Also, what is a Z train?
• The M and D trains are dirty and also take too long to show up.

Yawn. As my high school calculus teacher was fond of saying, these findings are “intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer.”

The problem isn’t that people aren’t telling the MTA the right things, the problem is that the MTA’s survey is too general to be useful. It asks the easy questions and gets the obvious answers, masking the nuanced problems specific to each line. These specific complaints, I believe, are where the MTA could make some real improvements to the subway system.

For example, after the votes are tabulated we will no doubt learn that the top complaints of G train riders are “reasonable wait times for trains,” “minimal delays during trips,” and possibly that the “sense of security” is low. A train schedule—presumably the MTA records data about the timeliness of their trains—and a crime report would tell an MTA official the same things.

A couple of focus groups would tell them even more: these concerns are heightened on nights and weekends, when the G all but shuts down. The G train is actually very reliable during rush hours. Riders may amplify their concerns as a result of the G train’s reputation for being extremely unsafe and unreliable, a reputation gained in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Specific questions to specific riders about their G train habits would uncover these biases. Instead, we get the following findings: MOAR. FASTAR. SAFAR. Not surprisingly, that’s what everyone who rides any train line in the city wants.

A massive effort to understand the intuitively obvious.

Photo courtesy of randombit on flickr.