The content looks very exciting indeed and the editors-in-chief have done a great job at getting some of the best people in the field to contribute.

Columns

• Filling Much Needed Holes, a column by Don Norman on unmet needs which you can find fully online here;
• Persona Non Grata by Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting;
• What’s in a name? Idioms, metaphors and design by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research.

Features

• Towards a model of innovation by contributing editor Hugh Dubberly;
• Designing for Disagreement by Paul Burke;
• Designing for the Last Billion by Gabe White of Frog Design;
• Primal Interactions by Alex Wright, information architect at the New York Times;
• Mobile Spatial Interaction by Peter Froehlich, Lynne Baillie and Rainer Simon of the Motorola Telecommunications Research Center;
• The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo by Secil Watson of Wells Fargo;
• The Linguistic Command Line by Aza Raskin of Humanized;
• Understanding Convergence by Stefana Broadbent and Valerie Bauwens of Swisscom.

In addition, there are several “Forum” pieces and a few book reviews.

Unfortunately, the publishers (ACM) have taken a weird approach to the online version: while the site has all the trappings of an online publication (with a nice design, a good table of contents, commenting, and article blogposts), it contains hardly any content! They only have excerpts available online – you have to be an ACM member to read the full text – in the printed issue that is (at $50 for 6 issues). Also there is no information about the authors online. Not surprisingly, the site has very few comments and I doubt it has much traffic.

I hope the hard copy will arrive quickly here in Europe, but even more that Richard and Jon will be able to convince ACM that this is not a very good online policy.