2006 unraveled year in review

2006 was a relatively quiet year at unraveled. It was somewhat busy with my partner and I moving to Munich and Zurich, respectively, but that’s not much of an excuse for the small number of posts. After all, the train ride between Munich and Zürich is 4 hours 45 minutes — plenty of time for writing. I think the larger reason — particularly in the first half of the year — was a personal struggle to find my voice. In case you hadn’t realized, things around here have taken a more professional tone over the past few months. This wasn’t coincidental; unraveled has been and will continue to be a journal for my thoughts on design, products and getting things done, but you can expect much less personal posts. My new Vox blog will be taking over where unraveled left off in that category.

Despite the small number of posts, I started two new projects (Desigin Inside Yahoo! and Urban Experience) and belatedly finished publishing my Human Computer Interaction Papers.

I haven’t previously written a “best of” list, but considering the change in focus I think this is a good year to start. So in no particular order, here are my three favorite posts of 2006:

• Freakanomics and Subway incentives Reflections on the Subway stamp program after reading Freakanomics by Steven D. Levitt.
• Email organization with one folder The title basically says it all
• Simplicity is highly underrated In which I set the record straight on simplicity

In terms of sheer page requests, 2006 was a stellar year, with total page requests increasing by 278% over 2005 and 326% over 2004. CSS Tabs continues to be the most requested page thanks to unraveled’s high rank in Google for “css tabs”.

Finally, the unraveled wish list for 2007, which currently consists of two items. First, I’m going to make a concentrated effort to publish something at least once a week in 2007. I think that’s a reasonable goal considering I posted 23 times in 2006. So once a week is only twice as often — not that great a stretch. Second, and I say this with a completely straight face, stop using those fucking Snap Preview Anywhere widgets. They’re about the most annoying third party interface tool I’ve ever seen and they’re everywhere. Even otherwise respected sites like TechCrunch are using them:

Just a few reasons why these are evil:

1. They interfere with a user’s flow, i.e. they’re worse than most ads
2. You don’t know they’re coming
3. There’s currently no way to turn them off. This is fixable using cookie preferences and would also fix #1 and #2. Editor’s note: Erik Wingren commented below that Snap’s Preview Anywhere bubble can be disabled

So please, in the name of Nielsen, just stop using them, or at least demand that Snap make them configurable so that users can choose to turn them off. Users have enough crap flying up in their face; why send them more?