Recently I let my list of accomplishments get in the way of remembering that it takes a village to do great work. It was a mistake.

I’m a confident guy. Some might say I’m too confident. In my career, I’ve worked incredibly hard and have been lucky enough to chalk up a few serious wins, things of which I’m extremely proud. I wrote a book on web application design that gets extremely positive reviews, wrote a ton of articles, founded a Flash users group and ran it for three years, became an Adobe Community Expert, and have generally had a lot of successes.

None of that, however, would have been possible had it not been for the great people I’ve worked with along the way. For a moment, I forgot that. Now I remember.

Over the years, I’ve worked with some of the best designers, product managers, developers, and editors in the business. Some of them known, some unknown - all great at what they did. They worked with me to turn not-quite-perfect designs into beautiful, functional applications and sites, turned not-quite-brilliant writings into books and articles that truly communicated a valuable message, and turned a disconnected group of Flash developers into a unified community that continues to perpetuate a culture of encouragement and support.

These people are the reason I have a list of accomplishments to stand on. I could never have done it all by myself. I needed the brilliant ideas they had to offer, and I needed the hard work they were willing to put forth. I needed their moments of genius. I needed their conversations at whiteboards. I needed them to make me justify every decision I made. I needed them to tell me when I was simply being stupid. I needed them to praise each other when things went well. I needed them to hold each other up when things went wrong.

I needed them.

I’m a confident guy, but it’s only because I’ve worked with great people that stood me up on their shoulders and helped me kick ass. It’s only because they enabled me to be confident. I can only hope I was able to do the same for them.

So, to all of you - and you know who you are - thanks. It’s a small word, but hopefully the words that came before it today help you see how much it means. Every project I’ve ever worked on has been made better because you were on it.

If you’re on a project right now that would be worse off without the rest of your team, take a moment to be appreciative. Take a moment to be grateful.

Just a quick note:

As of today, I’m no longer offering in-house training or consulting services, except to those people with which I’ve already made arrangements.

I may offer these services again in the future, but right now, I simply cannot sustain the demand and I need to do something to stop the requests from coming in.

I will continue doing onesheet reviews and expert usability reviews as time allows, but for now, I cannot take on any new design projects.

Thanks very much.

In billiards, there are a few different ways to win a game. The most reliable way is to spend a whole lot of time perfecting your stroke, tweaking your stance, becoming a master strategist, and practicing the tough shots as diligently as the easy ones. This is what the pros do. They spend years running drills, playing people better than they are, and pushing themselves to be great.

A less reliable, but still effective, way is to learn the basics of stroke, stance, and strategy, and become a decent player who can hold your own. No professional pool-playing aspirations here. Just a solid ability to beat most people who challenge you on a bar table.

The least reliable method is the one most people learn and subsequently stick to. It’s the “poke-and-hope” method. This means you poke your pool cue at that little white ball and hope something goes into a pocket.

Beginners almost always rely on poke-and-hope. More advanced players occasionally find themselves in situations where they need to rely on it as well. Pros do it the least, but it still happens.

In the same way that most pool players fall into the beginner category, most computer users never learn the basic concepts and techniques for using one. They do this, of course, because they have better things to do than master the personal computer, just like they have better things to do than become master pool players.

Regardless, this leads to all sorts of problems. People right-click in web applications and look for task-level options in the browser’s default context menu. They enter their email addresses into the browser’s Address bar and wonder why their email doesn’t come up. They hold a piece of paper up to a monitor screen and wonder why it can’t be scanned. More often than not, they click a Submit button at the bottom of a form and pray they filled it out correctly so they don’t see a bunch of annoying error messages that will make them feel stupid.

In other words, they poke and hope.

If you’re a poke-and-hope kind of pool player, you may finally be able to empathize with how most people feel when working with software on the web. There’s no skill, no foundation, no deep knowledge. There’s only the hope that whatever you poke will get you one step closer to stealing a game or two.

The cure for a lot of this is poka-yoke, Japanese for “error-proofing”. (Sadly, poke-and-hope and poka-yoke don’t really rhyme. But they look like they do when spelled out in a blog post, so I still get points for being clever.)

Eliminating the possibility of error in your application means your poke-and-hope users can now use your application without feeling like morons, even if they know next to nothing about how the web really works. Even if they think Internet Explorer’s Help menu contains information about your web application. Even if they enter URLs into the search box on your site in hopes that the new site will magically appear.

I’ve said this in presentations on many occasions: The single best thing you can do to significantly improve your web applications - now and forever - is remove the possibility of error. Users who can’t make mistakes feel smart. They feel respected. They feel productive.

Smart, respected, productive useres are the best users in the whole world, because they tell other people how great it is to use your application. And that’s just good marketing.

If you want some people like this talking about your application, start turning your poke-and-hope into poka-yoke.

To the members of the Stateline Adobe User Group:

Earlier tonight, I was supposed to give a web presentation to your group on the application design principles discussed in my book.

For reasons I can’t yet explain, I never received an email containing the URL to the Adobe Connect session we were supposed to use for the presentation.

This may be the result of a technical glitch. The email may have been caught by my spam filters, it may have been dropped somehow … honestly, I just don’t know what happened.

Regardless, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. I hope that we can reschedule the presentation for a future date.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have.

Thank you.

Powells.com has posted the results of a recent Q&A session with me in their Technica newsletter.

From the interview:

“What was your best subject in high school? Your worst?

English was by far my best subject, and math was by far my worst, which I think explains why I shifted my career from programming to interaction design. Interaction design and English have similar purposes — they’re all about communication. I can still get around an object-oriented programming language reasonably well, but to me, the most compelling thing about the web is that it brings people from all over the planet in great and crazy ways, and interaction design puts me in the center of that.

As a programmer, I always felt two or three steps removed from the people I was building things for. As a designer, I’m right there, drawing the lines between people and information and other people. This is what I’ve always loved about English, and it’s what I love about design.”

Incidentally, when I was starting my freshman year of high school, a guidance counselor asked me what I might like to do for a living when I got older. I told him I wanted to be a graphic designer.

I then promptly forgot all about the conversation and didn’t think about design again until I was 24.

I’m an awful graphic designer. Good thing I chose interaction design. Or perhaps it chose me.