Design Sapling.com

A few months ago, I wrote about how to use Gmail as your To-Do list.

I just came upon some email innovation ideas from Lifehacker.com.

Good suggestions for better email usability.

A short follow-up to the To Do list article.
Cooper (an interaction design firm) has some interesting ideas on email in-boxes.

New and Interesting Online Interactions
280 Slides. It’s beautiful, free, and very useful. An amazing online slideshow maker.

Swype. Take a look at an interesting new way to type on touch screens.

Five Second Test. For UI designers, understanding a users first impression is important. A 5 second test is a usability exercise where you show your interface design for just five seconds and then ask the viewer to describe what they saw. This website makes getting first impression very easy. Make it a part of your design toolbox if you make software or webpages.

Adobe CS4 Product Info. An interesting feature from Adobe’s CS4 product page. Roll over a product name in any of the 4 software bundles, and the same product is highlighted in the other 3 bundles. Makes it easier to compare bundles and decide which is right for you.

Did you know?
Pressing the Alt key in MS Office 2007 software will superimpose the hotkeys used with Alt onto the interface. Now it’s easy even for novices to speed up their workflow and stop using the mouse.

Other Interesting Things
DaPino Colada. Beautiful, free vector images from some talented designers in the Neatherlands.

Konica Minolta: Museum of Beauty. I found this presentation compelling. A virtual tour of the Venus de Milo, one of the world’s most famous sculptures, with insights about how it was made and what it may have looked like if the missing pieces were put in place.

Edit — Link was down last time I checked.

IxD is an art, not a science. Trying to make it a science can get you bad data.

Jakob Nielson’s article on Quantitative Analysis explains why sometimes numbers are misleading.

Chris Fahey alerts you to not get caught up in looking for science in the art of user research. He explains how some companies require statistics to prove something works. You can make numbers say anything you want.

I’m not saying statistics are useless and user research doesn’t give data. But user research is about finding patterns in a specific set of users: patterns that should translate into product behavior.