Saay What?


Two robots embracing.

The British town of Scunthorpe is a delightful place to visit. It is a perfectly normal town, with just one tiny problem. Its name is often unfairly redacted online because it contains a "rude" word. See if you can spot it… This sort of overreach is generally known as the Scunthorpe Problem. I ran into this issue on a kid-friendly site from a major brand. I had the temerity to type a perfectly normal word. A child friendly word. Dare I say it, a word that every English speaking child knows. I…

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On Swearing and UX Antipaterns


For the last few months, I've been curating a Tumblr of a very specific annoyance. I'll let Aral Balkan take credit for inspiring me. Any modal message—full-screen or alert—that interrupts user flow to ask them to download your app suffers from #doorslam #ux antipattern. @aral First, a quick definition: In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or co…

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