There Ain't No Such Thing As A Comfy Seat

During a keynote at AjaxWorld 2008 West the speaker talked about the "comfy seats" in a Ferrari, which inspired this post. I was reminded of the many articles in car magazines where the reviewer used words like comfy, great fit, relaxing, supportive, and so on to describe the seats. Or not. For every glowing review there are as many or more where the seats are describe as uncomfortable, tight, hard, non-supportive, and so on. It's the same car and seats, but the reviewers are all different.

I drew a rough table that I can't easily reproduce from this iPhone blog client, but it has cars in the rows and reviewers in the columns. The cars range from economy to SUVs to exotics, the reviewers from petite women to Biggest Loser contestants. You can probably guess that some of the results are size-centric, but other factors such as sex and desire come into play. A large man might put up with tight seats in a Ferrari because, well, it is a Ferrari. But would he honestly say they're comfy? I doubt it

If you're into WOA, RIAs, and so on then you know where I'm going with this given the title. It's not every day that I get to combine my passions for cars, sci-fi, and WOA, so this was fun to ponder for a bit. If you're a bit lost at this point, here are some connections:

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - Robert A. Heinlein
REST - Representational State Transfer
WOA - Web Oriented Architecture

In summary, consider using WOA so that you don't try to force all users into the same UI. It won't fit them all, and most won't find it comfy.