Pictured here is a very large "can't miss it" sign the MTA has above the staircase leading to the 8th Avenue bound (crosstown) L train at 1st Avenue on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It's the only train here, going only in one direction, with only one platform, and this is the only entrance or exit. This train takes you to Union Square, 6th Avenue, and terminates at 8th Avenue, all along 14th Street.

Notice the MTA originally had "only" on that sign, but has recently taped over it. This got me thinking about usability of labels and what they mean to people.

Only: more than one definition?

The word only can be an adverb, conjuction, or adjective. Here's its used as an adjective. The sign appears to be often enough misunderstood by travelers, thus the MTA taped over it. But why?

1. Were enough people confused to think the train only went to 8th Avenue? If so, did they wonder where the local was?

Perhaps people interpreted the sign to mean the only destination was 8th Avenue, not the only direction. As mentioned, the only direction this train - from this platform - is 8th Avenue bound. That's what the on board announcements say, and the signs should match what is said for clarity and consistency.

2. Did people wonder how to get to the L train running in the other direction? Is that what the 8th Avenue only means? That you can't go to Brooklyn from here?

A lot of new New Yorkers don't understand how the MTA lexicon works. The MTA doesn't label things north or south or east or west. They label by the destination (8th Avenue) or direction (Brooklyn-bound). The trains rarely are ever in a due north-south or due east-west direction. I'll hear people say "Is this train going East or West?"

My Design Recommendation

Tell people this platform and train is 8th Avenue bound and 8th Avenue is the destination. The "bound" matches the on-board announcement, too.

Ordering and eating yourself is certainly a rare thing.

Thanks Chris!

The demographic is older folks, so some of the design is geared toward non-web saavy people, but my goal was clean and elegant, and most of all easy to use - which I hope we hit.

Congrats to Meir and team for building out a vision that was built from the ground up. We really hope customers will love it!

Set in NYC, it's a story of addiction and its consequences.

When I saw it, not a single person talked, or even whispered in the movie. And when it was over, hardly anyone moved, and didn't say a word.

Luckily, I got a job at the Faculty Research Center of University Computing Services, and was at ground zero of a high-tech lab that was allowed to try anything new. Anything. And this WWW stuff was really new, and really exciting.

Gopher was cool, but Mosaic was cooler.

Dr. Rashidi mentored me through the next few years as we embarked upon a fantastic journey of web servers, httpd, Mosaic web browsers, Marc Andreeson, NCSA, Netscape web browsers, Sun Sparc 5 Workstations, Winsock protocols, Solaris, NeXT, and a whole host of other highly technical things that 99.99% of people dismissed.

This was when Yahoo was still a project at Stanford. Google (Googol) was still a word that meant (1) followed by (100) zeroes. Mark Zuckerberg was only 8 years old.

The "world wide what?" people would say as I told them what I was working on. Ha! Boy I wish I had those conversations video taped.

But three years later, in 1995, people like Jeff Bezos realized it was going to be big. Really big.

Perhaps so did Phil Alden Robinson, a writer/director who released a fairly obscure 1992 movie called Sneakers. It's one of my very favorite films, especially for this line of dialog:

The world isn't run by weapons any more, or energy or money. It's run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data - it's all just electrons. There's a war out there old friend, a world war. And its not about who's got the most bullets, it's about who controls the information, what we see and hear, how we work, how we think. It's all about the information.

While he could be talking about media, he's actually talking about computer networks. Email. Web. Facebook. Google. Twitter.

As you can imagine, Phil's prediction turned to be quite correct. Eerily correct. It's all about who controls the information.

In this clip from Sneakers, Robert Redford (Marty) finds an experimental electronic device that can hack into any system by quickly rendering any encryption useless. Ben Kingsley (Cosmo) wants the device for himself. They then discuss the power of who controls the information...