Interface Design

  • This recent Klarna story is fascinating: The fintech firm Klarna is severing its relationships with two of the biggest enterprise software providers in favor of automating its services with AI. And the company says it could potentially eliminate more. Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently explained the rationale in a conference call, the financial…

  • There’s a lot to be said about how to secure our online information while providing a good experience; hasn’t anyone written this book yet? In any case, I think a good, uncommon, guideline would be: Do not use human memory To remember and recall takes work, and I’d rather not expend my precious attention and…

  • In this video I listen to the sound as it’s used in real life, talk about what the sound is intended to accomplish, and then give it a sound score. And then I try to improve on it. RGT is a great, freemium service that’s fun for cycling indoors. It connects to your bike and…

  • Can these disciplines be explained in two sentences? Click for a larger version…

  • Of all the images to come out of the iPad announcement, the one struck me the most was less about the device and more about the experience of it: Lying back on the sofa — isn’t that a nice way to be? And sitting or lying on the sofa with a 9.7 inch screen means…

  • Play Literacy

    …yes, that term sounds a little dumb, but it’s an idea I think will be important in the future. A deliberate spin on computer literacy, I think play will not only be important to designers to support creativity and innovation, it will be important simply to get along in an electronic world. In the past…

  • I’ll get the plug part of this post out of the way right here: I worked on a preview of Bill Scott’s upcoming webinar on What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering and I think it’s both very good and very important, and what’s more it’s a topic that I’ve never seen addressed outside…

  • I’m bummed I’ll miss Dan Saffer’s talk tonight on Tap is the New Click (though happy I’ll finally get to try Five Points as I take a client out to dinner). But on that topic, I just came across some examples of interaction design that do away with the click altogether. It’s radical enough to…

  • In my time spent at consulting firms, client sites, teaching, etc. I see a need for more just-in-time design education. No formal program can keep up with the rate of change in digital design. People need on-demand materials they can use during their work day in-between tasks. The materials currently addressing this need leave a…

  • Now that we have rich web interfaces and sufficient bandwidth there’s talk of the death of the web page. While that may happen someday, for now we’re on a gradual journey of using pages differently than we used to. One difference is simply introducing more direct manipulation, such as clicking and/or dragging the pages themselves…

  • Way back when, I was a journalism major in college. So I was pleased to meet the folks from Daylife last year and bat around some ideas about how they’re aggregating, understanding, and syndicating news applications. I just found part of the conversation lying around my hard drive and thought you might be interested in…

  • Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon shows how to enhance a Wii remote to build user interface tracking hardware. Here’s the multi-touch video:

  • I’d love to check out Scrybe to try the innovative interaction design for myself. If you have a beta invite can you share?

  • Have you ever upgraded software and then wish you hadn’t? That’s the feeling I get sometimes when using the new generation of rich user interface websites. Many are great, though some seem to be going over-the-top in a play for attention. We made some great strides with Web 1.5, simplifying the UI and increasing text…

  • Marc Rettig, one of the most thoughtful practioners in the user experience world, will be in New York next month discussing Interaction Design is Language Design… …The notion of a “design language” has been with us for years, but if we take the idea seriously, perhaps ideas and frameworks from linguistics can help us design…