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The big news for me out of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) has been the number of new Tablets introduced. It is an exciting time for tablet enthusiasts, with tablets running Android, Windows, and QNZ (from RIM) introduced. So, along with the iPad, you can now have a tablet running your favorite operating system.

Crafting and reviewing at the overall design strategy of a product is one of those upfront actions that helps to get all involved parties to agree on a consistent look, feel and design philosophy for that product's interface. Identifying the various business goals, user requirements and technological constraints helps the team set reasonable success milestones.

With developments in computer vision technology such as depth-sensitive cameras, engineers are innovating new means of interacting with machines.

Last week a friend of mine (smart, successful entrepreneur) was telling me about a copier he’d leased for his office of 20 people. Their old copier was no longer up to the task and they had decided to lease a new machine from a big copy machine company. They have the need for both oversized printing and colour scanning so the machine is they need pretty complex.

One of the things I am most intrigued by in the world of portable technology is the explosion of mobile social networkers. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace all available on the latest mobile devices, it is now possible to broadcast all of life’s happenings in real-time from the convenience of a portable handset.

Smartphones are all the same. It’s not surprising. Most phones have a very similar touchscreen interface, physical buttons (give or take a few), they have similar features: camera, GPS, Internet access. The building blocks are the same.

One of the key questions we get from clients is "how usable is our product?" There are various ways this can be answered, providing scores for various metrics (average task time, average user satisfaction rating, etc) is one option, but sometimes a single usability score is more helpful.

I have a confession. I love watching Star Trek, and almost everything about it: the humanoid aliens, the amount of dialogue that fits into a space battle, the reverse-analogy (take an analogy – find a needle in a haystack, for example – and precede it with technical mumbo jumbo, then mention the analogy to explain it all). I love the treklore.

Actually I've never been to a Mayo Clinic and to be honest I hope I never need to visit one. I am, however, a frequent visitor to the Mayo Clinic website. Over the last two years I've had the chance to work on design projects for a number of health-related websites and I often turn to the Mayo Clinic website for inspiration.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day. And what I thought was a totally crazy joke, turned out to have a lot of interest.

For the gag I forwarded an old message to the building list serve to my staff but changed the subject and content of the message.

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