Category: Products

This iPod design article is an interesting look at the hardware challenges Apple faced. From a user interface perspective there’s only this: ‘ “First and foremost, the product was elegantly designed in classic Apple fashion,” says David Carey, president of Portelligent. “They did product design from the outside in.” Carey says the company had a vision of what the player should be and what it should look like. The subsequent design parameters were dictated by its appearance and form factor.‘

Link courtesy of David Wertheimer.

Winners of the Industrial Designers Society of America IDEA 2002 Awards (shamelessly ripped out of their frameset. Pfffft). My fav, the BMW Streetcarver skateboard. Ahh, to be a rich youth in Bavaria.

Look there, in between the Oreos and the Pringles, it’s…an automatic teller machine!

The basic idea here is great: there are a million bodegas in New York that would like to have ATMs inside their tiny spaces. But why build all the cash-dispensing mechanics into the ATM when it’s sitting right near a machine that already does this – the cash register. It works like a normal ATM but dispenses a receipt at the end which you give to the cashier who gives you cash. Supermarkets can afford to retool their registers, but small shops can’t. It’s a little unnerving trusting your ATM card to this thing (at one point the display read ‘dialing‘, implying it had an actual modem inside), but when you need cash you’re desperate.

I wish I could come up with product names like the Eureka 4885AT Whirlwind Omega Upright True Hepa Bagless Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner.

Jim Kalbach published his case study of the Audi.com and Audi.de sites. Highlights: GoLive for schematics, dynamic layout changing with browser width, and heavy usability testing of the non-conventional navigation.