[Basement.org] Some of our earliest memories are tied to objects and things that are far less than perfect and rife with right angles. Corners say "go away." At the risk of sounding hoaky: smoother, rounder surfaces say "hold me."

Check out his paper entitled Information Objects for more on this.

I’ve been pretty torn lately with regards to Consistency vs. User Experience. On one hand, I think it’s incredibly important to have a rich set of common controls to provide applications written for an OS a consistent look and feel. People generally get lost when you create your own controls or develop new UI models. And that doesn’t even get into the little inconsistencies that crop up when several different ‘versions’ of a control pop up when there isn’t a common control (just look at how many different ‘expando’ arrow controls are all over Windows).

On the flip side, I can’t even begin to tell you how many times people ask me to make a control work in a certain way that it just wasn’t designed. And I have to say it: I really like rounded corners on window frames (check out these screenshots from Windows Live Messenger, not a fan of the orange though). What’s a developer to do?