A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs.

Check out Aza’s blog post for a more detailed discussion.

Accenture recently did a study and found that 95 percent of returned consumer electronic products in 2007 work properly despite many customers thinking they were broken. 68% of these returns were because the product did not meet the customer’s expectations and 27% were from buyer’s remorse. Returns cost money and ultimately customers.

What is causing that 68% of returns? A big factor is the user experience and usability of the product. Many products are complicated and hard to figure out. Many users don’t look at the instruction manuals. One study found that the average U.S. consumer spends only 20 minutes trying to make a device work before giving up and returning it. Let this be a lesson to companies that want to reduce the returns of their working products: focus on the User and create easy to use, usable, intuitive products.

Great presentation by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path at the 2008 IA Summit.

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I wrote about The Future of Folksonomies before so of course I was interested when I read an article on Using tags to improve the Flickr experience. The article discusses a talk given by Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s service director of product management, about the next generation of tagging and how tags can provide a better user experience when searching and discovering.

I think the article just reaffirms my point that information architects are and should be looking for new, creative, and intuitive ways to use tagging not only on sites like Flickr, but on all kinds of sites. I’m interested in seeing the various uses of tagging in the next few years.

Org Chart 2.0: Built for User Experience Systems describes new business organizational structures where the user experience is thought about throughout the groups instead of the many time-honored and well-established organization charts we see today. I think large, established companies would find it hard to adjust and change their structure but I could definitely see smaller companies or startups adopting a user experience driven organization.