Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Time

Millennia of living in a spatial world have taught humans how to organize and find things in such a world. Similarly, we have become pretty good at thinking about and organizing our world in temporal terms.

Although you may not remember exactly where inside a folder you’ve filed that report you wrote last week, you know for sure that you wrote it last week. You probably also remember the time of day it was, and you may even remember the specific day as well.

So, depending on your product, it may make sense to let users access their data in some kind of temporal view. Nintendo does a pretty good job of this; instead of a file system, Nintendo ...