Pssssst. Want to know a secret? Some of the best inventions are completely obvious. That is, given a half dozen years or so. At the time they're conceived, however, most good, obvious ideas just seem dumb, dangerous, or uninteresting. They have to - otherwise they'd have been developed already.

Case in point: the blog permalink. If you've ever read a blog, you know what a permalink is. It's the link you click when looking at a story headline in an RSS reader like Google Reader.

If you run a blog, you definitely know what a permalink is. It's the link that a Google user follows when they search for a topic you've written about. It's what other authors link to in their own writing, thereby increasing your ranking in Google. If your blog is anything like mine, Google drives a lot of your traffic, and the permalink makes it all possible.

A permalink is nothing more than a fixed, unique identifier (URL) for online content. Blogging would have never caught on without it.

I recently ran across Tom Coates' excellent essay on the lowly permalink. He describes the time around 1999-2000 when permalinks didn't exist. If you ran a blog back then and wanted to write about someone else's blog post, you had to link to the other blog's home page. As the author you linked to continued to post, the content you had discussed in your own blog disappeared from the other author's front page, making your link irrelevant.

It was a huge problem, yet few perceived it as such. Interestingly, Coates even admits to having been against the idea of permalinks because of their hacky nature. Besides, they didn't seem to do anything useful.

So the next time you're stumped while trying to find something to work on that matters, try picking up a dumb, dangerous, or uninteresting - yet obvious - idea and run with it. In six year's time your invention may become so well known that most people couldn't imagine the world without it.

Image Credit: mklingo

Designing good user interfaces is difficult work. One of the hardest things about it is what you're forced to give up: abandoning your hard-won mental map and adopting that of the user; stripping half the product's features - and then stripping half of what's left; and fending off featuritis with a big club as the product matures. Everyone knows these things are important, but for some reason we repeat the same mistakes over and over.

So it was with great enthusiasm that I found Robert Hoekman, Jr.'s new book Designing the Obvious. Good technical books collect illustrative examples and present them clearly. But great technical books provide a system for understanding the examples. Designing the Obvious is one of them.

As an example, have you ever considered a confirmation dialog to be a symptom of a fundamentally flawed application design? The next time you find yourself needing one of these doodads, consider this passage:

The only implementation-model piece of design I've seen while using Backpack is the JavaScript alert message that pops open when I attempt to delete something from a Backpack page. It asks, simply, "Are You Sure?"

While the message is a pretty standard confirmation message - which we're all used to seeing - it's a sign of the underlying system. It's a big ol' banner that says "I don't have an undo feature and the only way I can deal with you deleting an object from your page is to interrupt your workflow with this message to make sure you know what you're doing."

Hoekman's solution is simple - give your users an undo feature and ditch the confirmation dialog. This makes perfect sense, but how many times has the opposite been done instead?

Sometimes the obvious is far from obvious.