YeeHaw

I'm happy that at least one company tries to get it right BEFORE unleashing its products on the public. From my experience, the iterative approach often means that a bunch of casual users are given as much input into a design as the designer who devotes months or even years to trying to solve a problem holistically. Iterative design usually means Frankenstein design, that is, a product with way too many unnecessary features, a lack of cohesion and just plain ugliness. The iPhone could not have been created iteratively, and even if it had been, it certainly wouldn't have had the design impact it did. I don't think Google is even on the same planet as Apple, design-wise.

Do employees actually take vacations at companies without a predetermined number of vacation days?

I think it really depends on how many products you need to display. If you have 200 products in a category, I think you'd want the user to be able to scan very quickly through all of them (via a grid), whereas if there are only a few, you'd want them to consider each product individually (vertical listing).

I thought the article was impossible to read at 16 px - just not enough density - too few words per line and too few lines per screen to read comfortably. I'm 46.

I've yet to meet a good designer who LIKES to code.

Definitely a regular login/password using my email address as the username and no validation on the password. I hate when I have to come up with a unique, really complex password for a site I don't use often unless it's a financial site or something.

Whenever I log in with Twitter or Facebook I'm always afraid that whatever I do on that site will be published to my Facebook or Twitter status.

My Google password is unique and precious and I don't want to use it log in to anything but Google.

I think Netflix solves this problem nicely. You use a computer to add things to a queue and then a remote to browse through the queue.