Hawkins Talks In general, I think messaging is one of the really big applications for people. There's PIM-personal information management. That's what we did at Palm and Handspring. There's voice communication-the cell phone. And there's messaging. There's also a fourth [application], browsing and transactions, but that hasn't taken off yet from a wireless point of view.

Critical Thinking in Web and Interface Design The most common failure of development projects is the inability to correctly define the problem. If the goal is vague, it's impossible to know whether it's been solved it or not. And even if the goal is well defined, it may be the wrong goal for the situation in which the design will be used. A well-built machine gun won't help you repair a flat tire. So these two kinds of failure, vague goals and the wrong goals, have nothing to do with technical acumen. If you can't prevent these kinds of failures, even the best developers or designers in the world will not succeed. You may write great code or create wonderful designs, but if you don't solve the right problem, your efforts are wasted.

Technology Review - The Net Effect: Rememberance of Things Past Today it is data, more than money, that is the lifeblood of our society. And yet more than three decades into the "Information Age," data is something that we still don't quite understand how to steward. Data is not physical, not something that you can lock away today and hope you'll be able to access in 10 or 20 years. Large collections of data are almost impossible to safely maintain—especially over long periods. At the same time, data is just as difficult to dispose of properly. Indeed, individuals and businesses now have so much data in so many different formats on so many different computers that we are all heading for our own individual data catastrophes.

The church of usability - Web Building - CNET.com Who are these special individuals, the prophets of effective Web user-interface design? We sought out and interviewed six of these inspired souls, scribed their words, and made them Web. You may already belong to one of their factions, but we've placed each on his own mount so that you can contrast and compare and pick a path to usability salvation. (Note: The editors of Builder.com take no responsibility for crusades, jihads, or other religious warfare inspired by these individuals.)

Debunking the myths of UI design

MYTH: Design is a luxury.

REALITY: In his 1990 book, The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman offers the traditional antidote for all those who underestimate the role of design in our lives. The issue is not whether design should happen -- it always happens. Everyone in product development does design work, whether they know it or not. Moreover, the design is the dimension of a product that customers see and feel; it is what satisfies or disappoints them.

In software development, design is widely misunderstood and undervalued. Often no explicit user interface design is done separately from the code. Iterative design then becomes recoding. This is a short-sighted strategy because it results in significantly more code being written in the long run. Because design is unavoidable, the real issue is whether it is left implicit in the software being developed, or made explicit and captured separately. The useful debate is about how to do design work well, and how to capture it in an optimal form for communicating to those who implement it.

An explicit user interface design can focus on how a product satisfies customer wants and needs rather than on how to build it. This can make implementation more difficult, but that is the price to be paid for focusing on the real goal of product development. An explicit design allows for early detection of implementation issues, as well as for placing the primary focus on satisfying users. Simultaneous design and implementation sometimes occurs on small projects. However, this approach is not scalable and requires some very special, multitalented people. Software development superheroes are in short supply.

News: The prerogatives of innovation When I step back from all of the effort to create appliances and products that provide complete solutions, I realize the products that are supposed to do me the most good aren't selling as well as the simpler technologies that enable me (and us) to create our own solutions.

Beyond the Wireless Bubble
But that future presence, like the company's past success, will be driven as much by what makes Orange tick as by how well its phones work. "Your values need to be austere," says Hirschhorn. "At Orange, we picked just a few: dynamic, friendly, innovative, trustworthy. Those values create a framework that helps people understand us -- and they cross all cultural lines."