Whilst surfing, I came across this quotation by Harley manning of Forrester Research which neatly sums up user-centric/holistic design issues that today’s wiser creatives are taking on board:

"For online customers, user experience wins out over marketing messages. If your advertising says that your company is fast and smart, but your Web site is slow and broken, your site will leave the more lasting impression about your brand."

With both client and service sides now taking an active interest in usability issues there is a danger that aesthetic design increasingly takes a back seat to usability as function edges out form. As many people have already noted, often-respected usability sites may work well but that doesn’t excuse them looking ‘pig-ugly’. So it’s up to us ‘creative types’ to take the research, heuristics and focus groups and mould them into our online equivalent of the Audi TT where they tell us, "Form and function are equally important."

Most of us will have been to Nielsen’s www.useit.com or Tognazzini’s excellent www.asktog.com but it often helps to get directly involved. The following are mailing lists presenting knowledgeable discussions on everyday design/usability issues:

Advance for Design London (Lonadv4design)
The objective of Advance for Design London is to establish a new community of design practitioners who are challenged to design for a world that is increasingly digital and connected.
Subscribe:

London_usability
Already plugged by Sam in a previous thread but no apologies for repetition: a group to provide a forum for all those working in Usability, HCI, Ergonomics, UI Design, Information Architecture and / or User Experience in London.
Subscribe:

UsableiTV
The Interactive TV Usability Network. This egroup provides a discussion network for researchers and developers who are interested in the human factors issues relating to interactive TV (iTV) services.
Subscribe:

CHI-Web
CHI-Web is an ACM SIGCHI moderated discussion list on human factors aspects of the World Wide Web.
Subscribe:http://www.acm.org/sigchi/web/chi-web.html

Usable mobile
At the moment WAP offers a poor visual environment and unreliable services- however, this will not always be the case. Usablemobile.com proposes to take lessons learned from current generations of 'mobile internet', to inform the design of future mobile devices as technology evolves.
NB: Members must be invited, Only Managers & Moderators can Invite
Home: http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/usablemobile