"Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning — presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning." (my emphasis)

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I like color picker / changer on the left hand side. Useless but fun !

I'm also kinda with you on this one. There is clearly a lack of good execution and serious navigational issues. What surprised me the most was how outlandish the design is for such a large organization. They went down a risky road, tried to be different and mostly failed. Nevertheless, to note at least one positive point, I do think there was a good initial intention and an interesting creative starting point. Alas execution is just as — if not more — important than the initial creative spark.

Not my work in any case, I kinda stumbled upon it and was surprised in many ways by it — positive and negative. So I was curious to find out what the fine people at DN thought about it.

Nice article and good points. Altough the intro got me wondering : can we still refer to UX as a new concept ? I see UX articles state this from time to time and it strikes me as odd each time. I mean, Don Norman coined the term over 20 years ago. Of course, the subject has evolved a lot, but so have most things internet related (design in general, developement tools and languages, etc.)