An absolutely fantastic post about software nudges and pop-ups by Mike Swanson: If you’ve ever read about “choice architecture” and nudging, this will feel familiar. The modern language for it was popularized in the late 2000s, and the core idea is simple: how choices are presented changes what people do, even if...

Neil Panchal writing in 2020 about a cool little page called diskprices.com: The performance of this website is stellar. It loads almost instantly. And the list (although it’s not sortable) gets the job done, it is sorted by price already which is the most important attribute. Diskprices.com deserves the UI/UX award...

I stumbled upon this small page about friction by Carl Barenbrug. I found myself vehemently disagreeing with one example listed; I don’t think Undo Send is an example of friction, as to me it actually feels like the exact opposite (“Are you sure you want to send this email?” dialog box would be friction – just like...

I love how this Byte magazine archive by Hector Dearman tries to do something different. It inspired me, and reminded me of the excitement of what Internet was supposed to be. I think we all wanted the web to feel more like this – fast, with infinite information right at your fingertips, the biggest library you...

A great post duet from Craig Hockenberry that flew by on Mastodon and clarified something for me: [For] the extra work to create a custom SF Symbol, our experience is 8-10 hours per symbol. This is also an expert level task: lots of knowledge on how SVG control points work and how to maintain compatibility across...

A week ago I asked on Mastodon and Bluesky: What are you favourite well-made apps or sites? Phones and computers alike. Doesn’t have to be “pretty,” but well-made according to whatever definition works for you. I specifically made it kind of vague, and these are the answers I got. I grouped them into categories and...

If you choose to remove the app names from the springboard, a small thing Apple could do would be to show the app name in the long-press menu here. Otherwise, I found it feels really easy to forget the name over time! (It would be a small riff on this disambiguation detail.) #interface design #ios #touch

I’m strangely conflicted about sharing this post about taste from Roger Wong: Sensitivity is how finely you perceive—noticing friction, asking why a screen exists, catching the moment something feels wrong. Standards are your internal reference system for what “good” actually looks like. Both can be trained. The...

A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012. Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality”...

I was surprised at this little thing that appeared in my Chrome Canary this morning. It is rare to see an interface clean up after itself this way. This flew by quickly and wasn’t communicated very well, but I believe this changed my new tab page from this… …to this: Now, I said “surprised” and not “delighted” not...

When I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, I noticed that a lot of intercoms have this particular animation of a cat sleeping and chasing a fly, on a loop: It was actually kind of fun to see it all over Hong Kong on LCDs of varying quality. Turns out this was Neko! A “screenmate” application from the late 1980s that...

Daniel Kennett in A Lament For Aperture, The App We’ll Never Get Over Losing (also note an alt title in the URL): Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their...