I get Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletters on usability design (as everyone should). He invented cheap UX prototyping, and is partners with Donald Norman in the Neilsen/Norman group of usability consultants. Donald Norman wrote "The Design of Everyday Things," among other seminal works on creating things well for humans to use easily.

The other day I clicked a link from Jakob's newsletter, to a page on his Useit.com site, to a page on Donald's site about UX design for the iPad. Halfway down the page I tried to use a search box that didn't work. Figuring a usability site would want to fix a busted search box, I emailed the "contact" address to report problems, since it was the least I could do.

Reporting broken links on a valuable site really is the least you can do. It's like closing gates when hiking across someone else's land.

To my slight surprise, Donald Norman himself wrote back, and said it was an old page with a bad layout. "Yikes! I didn't realize Jakob had linked to that page!" To my greater surprise, he wrote back the next day, saying it was a bigger problem than he'd thought, but it was going to get fixed.

For me, it was a little like saying, "Hey, Tom Waits! Your shoe's untied," and him stopping me later to show me his new zippered boots.