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Computer-human interaction that gives hands their due respect
Bret Victor's "Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design" is an eye-opening look at the poverty of the current options for computer-human interaction. Victor argues that our hands have enormous...
View ArticleUsing gestures to interact with surfaces that don't have screens
A joint Disney Research and CMU team have produced a demo showing gesture controls on a variety of everyday, non-computer objects. The system, called Touché, uses capacitive coupling to infer things...
View ArticleWhy user interfaces should be visible, seamful, and explicit
Timo Arnall from the design studio BERG has makes several great and provocative points in his essay "No to NoUI" -- a well-argued piece that opposes the idea of "interfaces that disappear" and...
View ArticleInternet-of-Things answering machine from 1992, with marbles
Durrell Bishop's 1992 grad project for his design program at the Royal College of Art was a brilliantly conceived riff on the answering machine, making use of physical, legible interfaces that made a...
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Help wanted: crypto-usability research director & ops manager
Simply Secure, a nonprofit developing usable, free, open interfaces for cryptographic communications tools like OTR, is hiring! I'm a volunteer on SS's advisory board. I joined because I believe that...
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Fellowships available in security usability
The Open Technology Fund and Simply Secure are offering fellowships to researchers who seek funding to work on usability in privacy and security technology. Both the senior and seasonal fellowships...
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Nagra IV-L: the pinnacle of tape recorder UI
A design classic from 1968, with all the dials, knobs, switches and buttons you could possibly need. The Nagra IV-L is a self-contained high performance sound recorder of exceptional reliability. It...
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Trends in Chinese mobile UIs
Last December, Dan Grover summarized the unique mobile app UI conventions he'd spotted since moving to China the summer before to work for Wechat, a Chinese mobile messaging app that also incorporates...
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Zero UI will "change design"
Zero UI is the new term for "invisible interfaces"—what happens in the future when all the clicking and tapping and typing is history: "If you look at the history of computing, starting with the...
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New trends in Chinese mobile UIs for 2016
Dan Grover has updated his excellent annual survey of UI trends in Chinese mobile apps with a new installment that covers the t-shirt icon, the happy shopping bag, the moving SEND button, the rise of...
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Futurististic computer screens are mostly blue
Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff demonstrated that in movies depicting computers in the future, the screens are mostly blue. Some interesting exceptions: 1991's Terminator 2 made red popular, and the...
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Instagram for Windows 95
Misha Petrick reimagined the Instagram app if it had come out 20 years earlier in Windows for desktop. Be sure to scan that .exe file for viruses! (more…)
View ArticleHere's the Pokémon UI redesign everyone's hoping for
Now that we're a month past peak Pokémon Go, developers would be wise to incorporate Wendy Borg's elegant proposed UI redesign to maintain interest. (more…)
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Help Kickstart these cool geometric music controllers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5bB7HogWI Michael Samuels of Sonic Geometry is Kickstarting a set of polyhedral sound controllers that let users shape sound and light into a multimedia performance....
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California just launched a "Digital Service" based on the amazing UK...
Since 2011, the UK's Government Digital Service has radically transformed the way Britons interact with their government, streamlining bureaucratic processes, opening up data, and making APIs...
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Historic accord reached in bum-washing bidet toilet UI conventions
Japan's leading bidet toilet manufacturers (including Toto, Panasonic, and Toshiba) have come together through their industry association, the Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, to agree...
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Washington Post and Jigsaw launch a collaborative pop-up dictionary of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFkl_SoThnY Information security's biggest obstacle isn't the mere insecurity of so many of our tools and services: it's the widespread lack of general knowledge about...
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Listen: how to secure software by caring about humans, not security
Scout Brody is executive director of Simply Secure, a nonprofit that works to make security and privacy technologies usable by technologically unsophisticated people by focusing on usability and human...
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When should web designers use modal overlays?
"This web page needs to be interrupted by a lightbox effect and a modal dialog asking me to sign up for a mailing list," said no one ever. (more…)
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