To be fair, I am traveling and haven’t looked for solid evidence or citation that this works for people, but I personally like this approach: in lieu of a separate language selector button, each option here itself is both a language selector and a commit button. The labels themselves are not the name of the...

Speaking of fly-by-wire… William Langewiesche is one of my favourite technical writers. He finds a way to explain complex aviation aspects really well, and then add a certain amount of beauty and poetry on top of that. His style was a big influence on my book, and I like him so much I once compiled links to his...

This 9-minute video from PetaPixel probably won’t make much sense for non-photographers, but there is something refreshing about this idea that there are still places where adding software is seen as positive: The video talks about Tamron’s lenses which have their own software (independent of the camera), and even...

It is common knowledge that Luigi is just a palette-swapped Mario, and that the characters facing left are the same characters as those facing right, only rendered mirrored. This interesting 9-minute video from Core-A Gaming explains how this can be kind of tricky for fighting games in particular: Suddenly, a...

This is a typical iOS Gmail dialog that allows you to snooze an email so it resurfaces later: If you invoke that function on an email that’s an order receipt, a new option appears: It’s great to see this clever and thoughtful button which is likely the best option here. But: It reshuffles everything else, preventing...

The search for the strangest Adobe setting continues in Lightroom, where the first option in the Interface section is… end marks: Presently, only one option is there… …but at least back in 2012 there were many more: What does it do? It adds an old-time’y glyph at the end of either left or right panel. The internet...

I linked to this opaquely on Thursday, but it deserves its own entry. Michael Bierut’s 2005 essay called “On (design) bullshit” is one of my favourite design essays: It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of...

During my first year at Figma, I designed and printed a run of posters for the office titled “Design is more.” The idea was to highlight that UX design is more than people expect, and connected in interesting ways to other domains. Today, they feel like a spiritual predecessor to this blog. The first series was...

I had no idea it was Alan Kay himself who was responsible for the mouse pointer’s distinctive shape. In 2020, James Hill-Khurana emailed him and got this answer: The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives...

I think about some aspects of interface design as sugar. This is how you adjust the photo in Photos app in the previous version of iOS: And this is the same view in the current version: The difference is in the delayed/​animated falling of the notches. I don’t think it’s great. It’s “delightful” in a rudimentary and...

A smart post by Matheus Lima at his Terrible Software blog: What you just learned is that complexity impresses people. The simple answer wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t interesting enough. And you might carry that lesson with you into your career. […] It also shows up in design reviews. An engineer proposes a clean,...

One of my favourite genres is “I’m going to teach you something secretly while you’re having fun.” This 2020 post by George Cave is ostensibly about Lego interface panels, but quietly sneaks in some stuff about shape coding and other kinds of coding: The Lego interface panels seem to have a certain hold on people....