Feathers as a case study in Emotional Design on Think Vitamin
Aarron Walter has an article titled Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users on Carsonified's Think Vitamin, in which Feathers is featured as a beautiful example of Emotional Design:
Aral Balkan’s Twitter iPhone app – Feathers – deftly combines usability and emotional design to create a pleasurable user experience. As you type a tweet, a cute birdy mascot starts to fill with color to indicate how many characters you have left of the 140 maximum… While satisfying a basic usability heuristic to provide feedback about system status, Balkan has also created an interaction with which his audience can fall in love.
Aarron is also featuring Feathers in his An Event Apart talks titled Learning To Love Humans—Emotional Interface Design. His next talk will be in Minneapolis on July 26th and Aarron and I will both be presenting at FOWD in London on May 17-19.