Dave's Getting Married – Back in a month!

That’s right, folks, now begins a whirlwind month that includes my bachelor party (New Orleans, woo!), wedding, honeymoon, and moving apartments! And in the midst of all that activity, I thought it best to take a hiatus from Unpressable Buttons and come back when I have both the time and energy to resume pondering product design. So, come back in mid-July for a resumption of my daily posts – or subscribe to the blog, and you won’t even have to worry about remembering.
In the meantime, if you need a fix of product design use and usability reading material, I can recommend the following blogs:

• Good Experience Blog - Mark Hurst’s blog focuses on the user experience, touting it as the raison d’etre for all products. Also be sure to check out the Flickr photo group he administers, ThisIsBroken, chock full of designs gone wrong.

• Uselog (aka The Product Usability Weblog) – Jasper van Kuijk's blog on consumer product usability, with consistently excellent examples and intelligent commentary on product design.

• Small Surfaces – A blog by Gabriel White, a former coworker, focusing especially on human-computer interation in handheld devices.

• And of course, the sources for most of my material, Gizmodo and Engadget - dozens of posts a day on gadgets ranging from brilliant to boneheaded. Check’em out, and just think – why will or won’t this work for users? It’s the game I play every day!

I’ll see you all in a month!

Cheers,
-Dave Gustafson

Contribute

You don't have to have any experience with product design, engineering, or ID - just be observant, find those little things that matter, and have a desire to share the good, the bad, and the ugly with the world!

Anyone can comment on the blog posts, so feel free to do so. And going off on tangents is encouraged, since a lot of these things are more related than they might seem at first! Just be nice, and keep an open mind.

If you're interesting in contributing as an author to Unpressable Buttons, contact Dave at davegus@gmail.com. Don't be shy!

Contact

Dave Gustafson
Email: davegus@gmail.com
Website: davegustafson.com

About

Unpressable Buttons:Product design use and usability,
Designs old and new,
Inspired and unspired.
The little things that matter.

Pretty much everything around us has been designed; whether or not the designers did a good job, or were even paying attention, can make life enjoyably easy or just plain frustrating. Buttons, ubiquitous and widely varied in design and quality, are emblematic of these tiny but powerful choices in creating a product.

Some are irresistibly satisfying to push, like the click-click of a favorite retractable pen. Others infuriate us, like the crosswalk button whose metallic creak leaves us skeptical that it really got "pressed" at all. Special situations call for special buttons, like the covered missile triggers on jet fighters which are really designed not to be pressed. Sometimes buttons are called on to do more than they should - a basic bluetooth headset may have one button that can be pressed for 1, 3, 5, or 7 seconds to perform different, optimistically memorized functions.

This blog aims to call attention to these tiny elements of product design that too often fly under the radar, lost to the glamor of sexy profiles and feature-laden spec sheets. Because once a product's newness fades, it's the little things we have to, or get to, live with.
The Author:

Dave Gustafson is a product designer and mechanical engineer currently working in creative design consulting. Somehow, through overexposure to design compromises made between aesthetic industrial design and engineering for efficient manufacturing, a passion for real design usability has come out. Holding bachelors' and master's degrees in product design and mechanical engineering Dave lives in Palo Alto with his fiancee. He enjoys Burning Man, poker nights, and occasionally drumming with the LSJUMB.

Contact:
Email: davegus@gmail.com
Website: davegustafson.com