Why is there a short wait if you press a button on your headphone remote or your AirPods to pause the music? Because the interface has to let a bit of time pass to figure out if you’re going to press the button again, making it a double press (advance to next track) instead of a single press. This kind of...

A few years ago, some sort of a bug at my work caused all of the timestamps appear as “54 years ago,” a seemingly arbitrary date. It took me a bit to realize: “Wait, you know what year was 54 years ago? 1970!” “Why is 1970 important?” asked another designer. I explained that by convention, Linux time counts up from...

I’ve loved Chris Staecker’s videos about calculating devices and machinery for years now, and I finally have a reason to link to one here. This is a fascinating 12-minute review of The Kensington Adding Machine from 1993: It’s a fun (as always) watch, but as a UX designer, it’s also interesting to try to figure out...

Paul Ford in 2014: As far as I can tell, no truly huge world-shifting software product has ever existed in only one version (even Flappy Bird had updates). Just about every global software product of longevity grows, changes, adapts, and reacts to other software over time. So I set myself the task of picking five...

One of the readers (thank you, Peter!) reminded me that there is a version of a blink comparator that all of us are exposed to perhaps every day: many photo editing apps – Apple Photos, Darkroom, Aphera, I imagine others – allow you to quickly compare the photo as-shot and with your edits. Sometimes it’s a tap,...

The 2016 launch of No Man’s Sky and the 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077 were catastrophes. No Man’s Sky fell so incredibly short of the promises the founder shared over the years – from smaller ones like rivers on the surface of planets, to huge ones like seeing other players – that some people felt it must have been...

Just like the video I shared last week, this 20-minute video by Mariana Colín at The Morbid Zoo is sharper than most, and also extremely entertaining: Colín is not “in tech,” and the video is of “the king is naked” variety which is very, very refreshing. Among many good observations, this caught my attention as...

In late 2023, designer Anthony Hobday published a small list of 20 interface quality of life improvements, and recently Hobday and Katie Langerman chatted about it on an episode of their podcast Complementary. It’s a fun listen (perhaps if you skip a bit of a bummer 9-minute beginning), covering four listed things...

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain. There are three main international keyboard layout variants in common use: American (ANSI, with a horizontal...

A 21-minute video from Karl Jobst about a 2025 videogame cheating scandal: In short: One of the professional teams in the FPS game Squad built a sophisticated set of scripts that made it easier to use the game for esports tournaments by adding additional UI, useful stats, a floating camera, an extra...

Two great posts about interaction latency on the hardware and software side. First is from Ink & Switch: There is a deep stack of technology that makes a modern computer interface respond to a user’s requests. Even something as simple as pressing a key on a keyboard and having the corresponding character appear in a...

In the previous post, I wrote: I understand that the best way to compare two things visually is to switch between them promptly in situ; our visual system is really good at spotting even small changes when aided this way. I thought it would be fun to talk about it briefly, because it gives me a chance to show you a...