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Seriously, how can anyone work productively with such a system? And frankly, what do these people's mailboxes look like? I receive about 100 mails a day, sans spam. Of those, ~70 are automated reports and simply get filed away by filters, 15 are digests from forums or mailing lists that I glance over if I have the time and the inclination, and the remaining 15 I actually have to read. Of those, ten are one- or two-liners, mostly of an informative nature, and five might actually have more than one paragraph and require a close reading.

For me Young's way of communicating comes off primarily as a way to offload work onto her subordinates: Figures for speed of production and reception of communication in different media led me to that conclusion. Typing on a physical keyboard is well below 40 words/minute for most people; since she mentioned WhatsApp I assume she is communicating primarily via a mobile device, where typing rates are even lower. Speaking, on the other hand, can go up to 200 words per minute (especially in a language like Spanish, which I assume she uses, that lends itself well to rapid speech). The recipient, on the other hand, loses the very powerful ability to skim. You don't know if you can skip a portion of audio unless you heard it, in most cases. Reading works vastly differently.

And her very first quote sums up why this idea is significantly flawed for professional communication:

The practical benefit of saying an awful lot without having to turn your slightly inarticulate thoughts into an articulate email is obvious [...]

The article goes on to quote personal communication and the conveyance of emotion as supportive arguments. Yes, I do prefer voice or video when talking to my fiancé or my sister – because the person matters as much as or even more than the content, and time there is not a scarce resource divided between several activities that all have to come together for me to get any work done but something I willingly set aside. But frankly, virtually all of my personal digital communication has long moved to messengers like WhatsApp and Threema. I can count the truly personal mails I receive each year on one hand.

I have been gently nudging the institute where I work towards more formal and more permanent forms of communication, precisely because of the drawbacks of this 'slightly inarticulate' nature of speech.

And, in general, there is nothing that I hate as much as pre-recorded voice messages. I have fought my mobile provider tooth and nail to get their oh so helpful super-duper voice mail box ("It's digital! And there's an app for downloading your messages! And it's digital!") disabled. Call me, or text me. Or GTFO.

A human cannot comfortably read too wide a column of text. That's the reason why most newspapers use multiple columns, even in portrait orientation, and why webpages tend to restrict text width as well.

Newspapers is a really really bad example. This is where I suspect you and I are both out of out depth...so I will refer to an expert. http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/nov02.asp [Bob Bailey, Ph.D., Chief Scientist for HFI, discusses the optimal line length when reading prose text from a monitor.]

The short version is Newspapers optimum line width was 3.6" with a maximum of 4", only the Galaxy note is small enough to work reading text, by your example, but that was with old 10-point printers with black on white text.

For Monitors using larger text...for speed wideris is better 8-9-10 inches about the Width of Widescreen Android Tablet ..but user prefer reading at 3.6-4" which is about the width of a Kindle Fire and other 7" tablets...so Apple tablets are out.

I think that's the hard part.

Think about developing a handheld game that needs to work on all screen sizes (iPhone, iPad, Android, Simbian, etc etc....). There have been efforts to minimize these problems.

Then think about the UI for a web page or game. There have been some pretty successful results, while they are anything but simple.

Now think about adding a 3rd dimension to all those problems. It's not as easy as saying "just make it realistic". There is a reason why lives are spent on UI. It's not an easy task and it just got a 3rd Dimension.

Oh and was it just me or did anyone think it was just a 3D FPS (Like Tribes, Q3, you know.... All FPS?) and not a 3D Displayed FPS.

"Know the author Ed Tufte."
I like Tufte for his arguments against using PowerPoint. His own works are mostly about using images to display information well. While some important HCI topics are covered, finding the few critical points would be much work for someone with an immediate need to create a guide for interfaces.

"Know what HCI stands for."
Much good information can be found with much less work by reading the free materials from the organization that certifies HCI professionals:
      http://www.humanfactors.com/
The only other certification requires a Masters degree in the subject, at which point another certification is pointless.

"Know your audience and let them evaluate Throwaway Prototypes."
Your audience is human beings. Dividing any further is an excuse for allowing poor interface design.

"If all goes well, this thread will serve as a good starting point for getting ideas/content to populate your new Wiki with."

I have two rules for good UI on my website (which needs better organization and will be fixed later this year):
1. Make every function as obvious as possible.
2. Require the least action for every function.
Many interfaces hide functions with menus, tabs, and dialog boxes. The functions are hidden, and activation requires more than one click. Some programs even show functions that cannot be used. (Photoshop has so many options that hiding some is almost necessary, yet still shows actions that cannot be used at the moment.)

The third rule should be to minimize the probability of mistakes. Many environments have dialog boxes with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons very close. Buttons should be explicit. Damaging actions should be separated. All options should be allowed.

Firefox is better than most programs and still violates these rules. If you attempt to close a window with multiple tabs open, the buttons are "Close all tabs and this window" and "Cancel - Do not close any tabs" (italics added for missing text). No option is presented for the most likely desired option to "Close the current tab".

These three rules cover every situation. More guidelines are useful for consistency, such as
- The expected action is always first and has a green background.
- Other actions may follow with yellow backgrounds.
- Cancel and other destructive actions are always in the bottom-left at least 20 pixels from other controls and have a red background.

A Great Brochure from Humanfactors.org is here:

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/guistandards.pdf

Page very close attention to page 14. It describes your situation as "Pitfall #4." And it's right.

Readability

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb99.asp

http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/websafe fonts.html

To address the first issue.. sure, stupid people..maybe they should be excluded from voting altogether.

However - remember the palm beach county ballot ?
Very nice linky explaining why it was so horrible
Now one might argue that the same issue would crop up if the same interface were used on a computer screen. Sure, absolutely.
However, when you deposit this ballot, there isn't going to be something saying "Are you -suuuure- you mean to vote for X ?" and help you realize that the stupid design of the ballot confused you so much that you voted wrongly.
As can be derived from my statement - e-voting can easily do this :)

On your second point - absolutely. However, I would like to point out that traditional voting methods are also subject to vote-rigging, just not 'as easily'. Remember that manual re-counts of already manually counted ballots yielded different results every time ? Humans aren't flawless.
Computers, with the odd alpha-particle-smacking-into-RAM exception, are; that is, for the purpose.
The people who code for these computers, of course, aren't. So we need verifiable code - no doubt about it.
But that has nothing to do with how easy it is to write this code.

Take Hello World.
print "Hello world."

Easy enough to code. Now we stick this hardcoded into a chip and it can't be read out. Some vote-rigger decides to change it so that every 100 votes, it will toss out "Hello Miss World." instead.
Nobody can verify this. Ouch.
However, that doesn't impact in any way how easy it was to write a proper "Hello world." in the first place. And, again, this is what has been at issue with the majority of these machine-issues. A task that should be trivial apparently being executed in such a manner that it does not give the correct results.
Now either that means somebody coded it wrongly by accident (stupid.) or on purpose (and that's where you're free to point out code verifibility). But writing the code itself is, I maintain, easy.

Not necessarily in Australia, but...

The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design Seminar

Info Design

Online training

Online Web design courses

It is a well known fact in the world of human-computer interaction research that you should not present more than 7 or 8 items at once to a user, since that is the maximum amount they can absorb at one time.

It is a well-known bogus fact.

The original paper that started this 'magic number 7' superstition specifically addressed working memory capacity. People don't need to remember menus, because they're right there in front of them, so memory limitations don't apply.

This is why U.S. phone numbers are 7 digits--not counting the area code--for example.

No, it isn't. The original paper that introduced the notion of working memory being limited to about seven things at a time was published in 1956. The existing U.S. phone number scheme was developed nine years earlier, so its designers could not have used the memory research to inform their decision.

See here for more info:
Summary article on number seven misuse in UI design
Original magic seven paper
Phone number history