I care a lot about design things. It’s part of caring about details, to me, and also caring about user experience. I’m not formally trained, but you don’t need two years of school to figure out that doors that say push, but have a pull handle, are confusing and annoying. (On the other hand, this is funny.)

Most of my Design Things experiences these days come about on the web. Some recent things:

Websites requesting usernames or emails where validation fails if there’s a single space character at the end of my entry. This just makes me livid. Email validation is hard (so I’m not quite so angry when you deny me a plus character, although it is in fact valid, BlueShieldofCaliforniaareyoulisteningtome?), but trimming trailing spaces? That’s easy. Why is there a trailing space character, you ask? Why do you care? Just trim the damn thing. But in case you just care because you actually care, it’s because when you do an autocorrect insert on a mobile phone, you often get an extra space.

Facebook videos. You think I’m about to say something mean, but I’m not. I am super impressed by Facebook’s video behavior. The video is muted by default, and stops playing when you scroll it off the screen. Someone thought about that one for a while. Good job, that person/people.

Google Calendar looks up locations in Maps (I think it’s in Maps — maybe also in your previous events?) when you start typing them in. It didn’t used to do this, and I wished it did, and now it does, and I absolutely freaking love it. I love it so, so much. It saves me so much tedious typing.

Flickr. I can’t even. Embedding a simple JPG is now practically impossible; the embed code is pretty much a little app. God, it is so terrible. Do they know that people use devices that don’t do those things? And I haven’t even used the new website enough to figure out how much I hate it, but I definitely hate it (although less than some people do? maybe?).