This is a very good essay that reminds me of my favorite passage of Jacob Nielsen's, from "2D is Better Than 3D": http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html htt

This is a very good essay that reminds me of my favorite passage of Jacob Nielsen's, from "2D is Better Than 3D": http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game. The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is far more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type the letters of someone's name... which means you have to remember the name in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where you touch one and it immediately dials them. I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of one common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general, even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.