Jakob Nielsen’s partner in crime, Don Norman (the one who has some sense in his head), has released the news that he is advising Microsoft on Longhorn. Interested to see what comes out of this and if anything at all comes out of it.

Norman, who has written several books on usability, was Apple’s design guru for many years and also worked for Hewlett-Packard. He is now advising Microsoft on the forthcoming Longhorn version of Windows, and agrees with its being based on a searchable database and doing away with a static file system view. The document-folder-cabinet hierarchy may be a fair simulation of the way an office works, he says, “but I just want to get my work done”. Wanting to send an email with an attached document and having to look in different folders and maybe start up a word-processing program is an obstruction to the natural way of working. It clearly makes sense to store everything once. Conventional file systems tend to produce duplicate files stored in different places.

If you don’t know who Norman is he is probably most famous for these two books:

• The Design of Everyday Things
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things

Both are good reads (dry in some parts) that help to offer a different perspective on how engineers should approach design.

via Scoble

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