The innovative online rental company Netflix is pretty great. They send me a CD in a little sleeve, I watch it, then I send it back. We’re only on the one movie plan, so I always chuckle when I see Netflix’s elegant solution to losing an envelope or DVD sleeve.

I’m guessing most people have the two DVD plan. So, Netflix’s solution works for most people. Is that good enough?

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I’m a big fan of my Mac. One of the best things about Apple is that they provide generous support via their retail stores. The other day I was calling in and received the following message:

“We regret that Genuis Bar reservations can only be made online.”

That works for me. I have a couple other computers. What about someone with a fried motherboard on their only computer? I guess they go to the library?

Again, most people probably own or have access to a second computer. Does that mean Apple should make some customers jump through hoops to get access to their otherwise great support?

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This is a decision we all have to make on the Web every day. Do we support people who have disabled Javascript? What about people with small monitors? Are we alienating a percentage of our users who don’t know what “FAQ” means by using the term?

Nobody can be everything to everyone, obviously. These decisions have to be made at some point, but they need to be made consciously. Who is our audience and how much work is it worth to support the outliers? Is the good for most solution good enough?

Techies Tom and Terry were working on a web site about rodents for Fritz the Cat. Fritz’s collection was extensive, and he had named each one. So, the two guys started creating the online gallery of Fritz’s rodents.

The main page had types of rodents, like mice, rats, and hamsters. Each type had a link to a special page with all the names of that type of rodent listed out.

Tom and Terry thought they were done with their work, so they showed it to Fritz. “I want to know how many I have in each category,” said Fritz.

“Oh my,” sighed Tom. Their system had not made it easy to get at the number of a particular type of rodent. They only worked on listing them.

“Aha!” cried Terry. “We can use an ordered list when we output the rodents. That way, a user clicks on ‘chipmunks,’ say, and then on the next page, we see there are four.”

“A wonderful, simple, gorgeous, brilliant solution,” exclaimed Tom, who was happy to save himself the work of rewriting the system to count rodents.

Fritz grimmaced, because he was thinking of the poor user, having to click to a new page just to find out the number of hamsters. “No,” Fritz said, “it should look something like this.”

Tom and Terry whimpered in unison, and went back to re-write their code. Eventually they admitted Fritz was right. It was much better to have the count in parentheses on the first page and not make the user over-click.

If Fritz knew all the toil it would take to make the system count his rodents, he might have acquiesced to the poor solution. But Fritz was not thinking like a technician, so he was able to come up with the optimal solution.

Of course, even better would have been if Tom and Terry showed Fritz what it would look like before they finished all the coding, but we can’t always think ahead, can we? For what it’s worth, this is a true story, and I am Tom.

A few months ago, this video about RSS (the technology behind my automatic updates) made the rounds. It describes the process “in plain english” using a very barebones technique they call “Paperworks.”

Watch it here:

The video’s creator describes why their method works

“The essence of the Paperworks format is simplicity – bringing down the bar of technology and presentation to it’s most basic level. By doing away with fancy graphic and soundtrack options, we can make room to think more deeply about the idea and concept that will convey the message in the simplest way we can.”

See also: Constraints and the four day work week.

My dad is a technician. With a degree in mechanical engineering, he knows his nuts and bolts. So, he devised a puzzle that fooled fellow technicians, but was solvable by those blissfully ignorant of his mechanical ways. The solution required someone to not think like a technician.

Dad put a split washer on a bolt, and topped it off with a nut. Then, he welded the bolt to the nut. It doesn’t take much of a weld to keep the bolt stationary. The object of the puzzle is to remove the washer, which appears impossible, and it would be if not for the next step.

Dad cut the nut and the part of the bolt it is connected to from the rest of the bolt. Using a threading tool, he created a new connection point, so that his nut/bolt piece was together the new end cap. Removing the washer from this puzzle is as easy as turning the bolt, just as when there is no immovable weld.

Here’s Dad’s story of one particular technician who tried to solve his puzzle:

“Mom took one to school and just tossed it onto the principal’s desk, saying that the object was to get the washer off. She came back much later and he disgustedly gave it back to her unsolved. She handed it to a woman collegue, perhaps his secretary, with the same directions. She just barely looked at it, gave it a twist and off it came.

The moral of the story, as we used to tell it, was that the man’s experience with how unmovable anything that has been welded is, welded his mind shut too. He was so sure that the weld could not be broken that he didn’t even try. Whereas the woman, who had no such welding experience, her mind still open to the fact that anything with a nut on it must turn, simply turned it and it opened.”

When I first started my WiFi site, it was going to have an accompanying publication. In fact, it had one issue, which ended up being a lot of work.

The vision, however, was to connect the real world, where Portlanders were surfing in coffee shops, to the online world these people were simultaneously inside. I wanted to shrink the web to this subset of laptoperati–participants in the Portland WiFi culture.

A recent NYT article all but declared online purchasing to be dead, because it isn’t growing at the rates it once was. But, as Greg Sterling says, there’s a huge growth opportunity in retailers using their websites to encourage purchases offline.

It’s another way of making the Offline-online connection. Newspapers need it. Local retailers need it. And websites with any local focus could benefit. Look at dating sites now (or, BBSes back in the day) for some examples of connecting people to each other. Chipotle does a good job of getting me from a site visitor to a burrito eater.

For now, an offline-online connection is a nice extra. Soon, it will be an important differentiator between successful local sites and those that continue to struggle.