I’m on a shuttle at just before 5:00 am. We are driving from the Sonoma Fairmont Mission to the San Francisco airport and it’s still dark, so we won’t be seeing much of the Golden Gate in daylight. As usual, I am checking my blackberry for messages that might have come through at night. I see an automated message from our blog, “awaiting moderation.”. It seems that our spam filter is learning and evolving on it’s own. It senses there might be something we don’t want to allow through, so our spam plugin in WordPress is kind enough to ask me to check this message out.

Just yesterday I found myself evangelizing the importance of taking handhelds into consideration when designing interfaces. This is something we talk about all the time. Having never actually looked at our blog console from my blackberry before, I had nothing better to do than follow the link. I admit that to my surprise, the handheld interface in WordPress is incredibly useful.

Very easily and very quickly I am able to follow the link from the WordPress notification email directly into the management console. Upon login, I am presented with all of the information I would normally see in my FireFox browser. Front and center, I am presented with items that WordPress suspects might be spam, and I easily navigate to the recent items and either verify whether spam or not. In noticing how easy and FAST this user experience is, I tried out most of the functionality on our blog console. Remember that it is 5am now and I am sitting on a bus driving through the rain. OK, I am a nerd….however, even this post was written from my blackberry. It’s easy to select or even create tags for my post. I can save and review later, edit my time stamp, add custom fields and I even have full access to the code shortcuts that allow me to insert HTML code snippets if I wish to use them.

This simple and fast user experience really validates for me the importance of developing web content with hand held consideration in mind. I rarely surf the web on my blackberry. Maybe because my expectations are low since so many sites have such horrible user experiences for “little screens.”. Maybe we would all be going to our blackberries or other hand held devices more often if our expectations were higher…and if we could count on very simple, direct and highly usable user experiences. Afterall, I would not want to just browse the web for hours on end with my blackberry, but there are so many areas that could be improved that could heighten our expectations for these simple things we need to do online.

Immediately after selecting “publish,” I’ll be adding my wordpress console to my blackberry shortcuts.