Gadgetopia

Emotion and Design: This is another essay from Don Norman that's very similar to the previous one we talked about a few months ago. This quote is interesting, and I wish I had it back when I had to defend my black-and-white Palm V from the PocketPC drones at my ...

Last year, I wrote a short essay wondering how the look of a site affected its usability. I said: To what extent will the 'look' of the site help or hinder it from achieving reaching its goal, whatever that may be? [...] Can simply re-skinning a site fundamentally change the ...

Adding style to substance: A good article on the resurgence of innovative design in product development. "'When everything else is commoditized, design is the one area where you can add value,'' says Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, the Palo Alto industrial design studio which has crafted everything from the Palm ...

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that ...

Shadows of future versions of Outlook?: Here's a look at an internal company memo about how to organize email messages. Essentially, you treat email conversations as threads of a discussion forum conversation. ...about half the time you use e-mail, it's a no-brainer. Someone sends you a message, you reply, they ...

I ve been reading a great blog called No Impact Man. It s about a guy, his wife, and their toddler daughter who live in downtown New York. They re trying to live for a year without casuing any impact to the environment. This means: no electricity, no garbage, no packaged products, no ...