I have mis-tapped plenty of times, but the errant tap only ever takes me one page forward or back. Compare this to the ‘ice cube on the counter’ slide that happens when my son reaches for the screen.

—Jon Bell , from Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll, via Lukas Mathis

When we’re reading on the desktop we have a quick shortcut for pagination: push the space bar to advance exactly one screenful through a web site or PDF. I rely on it so much that I react poorly when web designers obscure part of the viewport with fluff. When a chunk of vertical real estate is obscured, the definition of “pageful” changes in a way the web browser can’t anticipate. Jason Kottke learned this lesson with his blog redesign last year. He was swift to correct it.

But that’s the desktop, where the combination of scroll bar, wheel mouse, and keyboard gives us a lot of flexibility. Multitouch devices have a more limited set of inputs, and while some developers turned to scroll views with invisible pagination zones, iBooks’ designers evidently went in a different direction. iBooks makes you tap or swipe to advance one whole page at a time. If you discount the page scrubber, iBooks has no free-form scrolling at all.

Argue all you like over the superfluousness of animated page flips, but the aesthetics do little to affect the usability of the design: eliminating scrolling as the default means of advancement means less effort and less risk of losing your place.

It gives you the opportunity to re-check the most important piece of information in the form right before you hit submit.

—Russ Unger , from Solving the “Repeat Email Address” Form Issue. Maybe., via Harry Brignull

That “maybe” tells us what we all already know, though: it needs testing. The standard retype approach might just work better. Despite the common complaint that “everyone” just copies and pastes their initial input, I would posit that the kind of people who are most likely to make typos in their email address—namely my father—aren’t going to copy and paste. They’ll just do what the form says. I don’t copy and paste either, but I wear a seatbelt when I’m driving, too.

In any case, this approach feels nicer. Taking a piece of information and redisplaying it out of context is my own favored technique for catching typos. When I’m writing an essay or a proposal, I invariably wind up printing a hard copy and attacking it with a red pen. If I’m writing a blog post like this one in MarsEdit, I write in a small, monospace font and proofread in a full-fidelity HTML preview. The difference in typeface, size, and line length is a massive aid. The context switch lets me spot issues I would otherwise have glossed over, and it may be that the same thing works wonders for email forms. We’ll see.

Can we create a truly iconic logo without the backing of a very fat wallet?

—David Airey, from Are Iconic Logos Designed, or Bought?

Hard to believe it was five years ago I said the same thing about product names:

Extra doesn’t give you any clues that it’s sugar-free, nor that it’s gum. Cap’n Crunch isn’t the name of a cereal, it’s the name of a fun character created specifically to hawk cereal.

Logos are signifiers; empty vessels to be filled with the values of the brand. They are hopefully pretty, and they are hopefully emotionally significant to the people who own them, because then they have a chance of being emotionally significant to their customers. But they’re only signposts. They can’t do anything on their own.

When you have a million-dollar ad budget, then you can shove the logo in so many people’s faces that they recognize it. Even if they don’t love it. Even if they wish they’d never heard of it. Keep that up for a generation or two and you’ll have built something “iconic.”

The iPad, despite being nothing new, is still interesting, if only because Apple is making it. Apple may miss some fairly obvious features, but Apple never—absolutely never—half-asses anything. And some of those features will appear over time, as always.

—Paul Thurrott, from Understanding How Apple Innovates

And despite Thurrott’s recognition of the fact that Apple doesn’t half-ass its way through products, I still don’t think he appreciates it at all. I almost sense resentment in that realization. iPods, iPhones, iPads… they’re not “missing” obvious features in the sense he implies—that these features were forgotten or neglected—they were excised. Make no mistake that people inside Apple want these features too, but on the timeline and budget of a 1.0 project they usually can’t be done well enough to justify their inclusion.

People often look at a piece of shitty software, or even a badly-done feature on a piece of good software and say “it’s better than nothing.” But if it’s causing frustration to your customers and harm to the brand, then no, it’s not better than nothing. “Missing” features are as good as your imagination makes them. Missing features inspire anticipation. Bad features inspire hopelessness and disappointment. Cut them out.

—Jeffrey Veen, from 5 Minutes on Imitation in Design, via Janko Jovanovic

Watch the video at RC1

—Don Norman, from The Three Ways That Good Design Makes You Happy, via Janko Jovanovic

Watch the video at RC1

—Shawn Konopinsky, from User Experience Design for Non-Designers, via Janko Jovanovic

Watch the video at RC1

Immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

—Steven Frank, from Nothing’s Ever Black & White

Apple’s lesson over the last ten years has been that computer nerds care about a lot of stupid shit that mere mortals don’t, and nerds are outnumbered a million to one. To Apple, when it comes to defining the modern computing experience, we’re the group to ignore.

The iPad is gorgeous, and is enough of a computer to satisfy the 80% (dare I say 95%) of computing experiences that count. Email, Facebook, web browsing, chat, word processing, and a few games. I know that for me, today it’ll only be a casual-use device because I have “real work to do” but for many of my friends and parents and friends’ parents and parents’ friends? It’s all the computer they’ve ever needed.

I say, start with a hole in the wall and work backwards.

—Jesper, from email-init

It’s for that reason, and so many others, I’m wary of all this open source email client business. Open source software projects are notorious for their lousy interfaces, even on the Mac: an email client built by a committee of super-nerds would be a miracle to do any better.

Maybe call them the Chief Taste Officer.

—Nathan Bowers, from Can You Reinvent a Software Company by Hiring a Pixel Pusher?