Punctuated equilibrium: butterflies evolve rapidly to avoid disease

Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life has written a detailed report on butterflies that evolved rapidly to avoid bacteria parasites. The summary: only males are susceptible to this bacterium. In 2001, most males were killed in the egg: only 1% of butterflies in populations on Samoan islands were males (sex ratio 1:100). By 2005, the butterflies were still infected but the sex ratio was back up to 1:1 on two of the islands. The males had evolved a suppressor gene. By 2006, butterflies on another island had developed this mutation.

It took only ten generations for the butterflies to make this change.

Usability as a virtue

Vincent Flanders writes about the biggest recurring mistakes in Web design:

Mistake # 3. Mystical belief in the power of web standards, usability, and tableless CSS.

There is nothing wrong with Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS except they’re being touted by…guess who?…people who offer web design services specializing in…guess what?…Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS.

These are simply tools. Remember, nobody gets excited about the tools used to build a house (“Please tell me what brand of hammers you used!”). People get excited about how the house looks and performs.

Yes, Web Standards can make your site search engine friendlier, reduce bandwidth, etc. Usability is also very important but in an interview in 2004, usability guru Jared Spool puts everything in perspective:

I learned quickly that business executives didn’t care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn’t get us any more work. Instead, when we’re in front of executives, we quickly learned to talk about only five things:

1. How do we increase revenue?
2. How do we reduce expenses?
3. How do we bring in more customers?
4. How do we get more business out of each existing customer?
5. How do we increase shareholder value?

Notice that the words ‘design’, ‘usability’, or ‘navigation’ never appear in these questions. We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got. Today, I’m writing a proposal for a $470,000 project where the word ‘usability’ isn’t mentioned once in the proposal.

When we work with teams, we teach them to follow the money and look for the pain. Somewhere in [the] organization, someone is feeling pain because they aren’t getting the answers they want to one of the questions above.