In his latest post, Joel explains how creating great software involves finding, and fixing, the tens of thousands of tiny things that should be better. The unfortunate side effect he describes is familiar to all who know me: “It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything. Your significant others go nuts. Your family wants to kill you.”

As an example (as if one were needed), just yesterday I was ranting to Casey about the Ikea website. Take a moment to visit it, and see if you can guess what drove me mad about it.

I’ll give a clue. It’s in this list:

• Norge (Norway)
• Österreich (Austria)
• Россия (Russia)
• Polska (Poland)
• Portugal (Portugal)
• România (Romania)
• Schweiz | Suisse | Svizzera (Switzerland)

It’s really nice that they list each country in its own language. But the sorting order needs a good seeing to with a cluestick.

I was explicitly looking for IKEA Russia (or, rather, ИКЕА), but it took me far too long to find it in this list, as someone decided to place it just before ‘Polska’, seemingly mistaking the Russian ‘Р’ for an English ‘P’, without realising it’s actually the Russian equivalent of an English ‘R’ (their ‘P’ is actually ‘П’ – think of the Greek ‘rho’ and ‘pi’), and likewise for the Russian ‘с’, which is equivalent to an ‘s’ (remember the ‘CCCP’?)

This is a classic case of a nice idea executed really badly. The sort of thing that drives me insane on a regular basis. But that I get really strange looks when I point out…