General

Case in point: At some point in the past, perhaps the distant past, Apple added the capability to jump from letter group to letter group by holding down on the letter column, rather than just stabbing at your letter of choice and usually missing. After four years of using iDevices, during the course of writing this column, I accidentally held down for a second on an alpha character, causing the slide bar to appear.

via Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go?.

Interface geeks (and non-geeks) should spend some time with Ask Tog.

One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.

via A List Apart: Articles: Good Help is Hard to Find.

the problem of reasonable aggregation is no idle matter

via The Way We Live Now – Metric Mania – NYTimes.com.

the “extreme and hypothetical” illustration is quite good.