Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently and you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

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.

The Official Gmail Blog shows the evolution of Gmail Chat. In it, they describe having a usability lab to test out new features and ideas. The feedback from the testers are used to help guide their decisions. TechCrunch gave a peak inside Gmail’s Usability Lab. As can be seen, it is not some big lab with a two way mirror. Their lab is just a small room with a computer and some video equipment which any company on a budget can setup. I think what is most interested is that despite all the different iterations of Gmail chat seen from the links, Google eventually ended up with a very simplistic lightweight application. Sometimes, less is more.

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.

The iPhone 3G was announced today. Besides the faster speeds, the one component that gets me excited as a UX designer is the included GPS. Location based applications are coming sooner than you think. Social networks are about to get more personal. Want to geo-tag photos? No problem. The applications that have the best user experience will get the market share of iPhone users.