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....

Night mode is a mode inside the iOS camera app where the app takes a longer-exposure photo in low-light conditions, but “stabilizes” it programmatically, to achieve something similar to holding a camera on a tripod for the same amount of time. I noticed a little detail that might be new to iOS 26: the night mode...

You can tell the story of Mac OS via the story of its settings, and the same is likely true of Photoshop. Recently, spelunking in the preferences of Photoshop 2025, I found this extremely curious thing: To transcribe: Focus mode limits the appearance of certain optional user interface messages so that you can use...

I mentioned before how the old-fashioned pixels on CRT screens have little in common with pixels of today. The old pixels were huge, imprecise, blending with each other, and requiring a very different design approach. Some years ago, the always-excellent Tech Connections also had a great video about how in the era...

In the video linked in the previous post, one of the hosts mentions at one point: The biggest rebuttal is that the greatest audio engine of all time, the one baked into all Apple products, has 16 volume steps. And no one has ever been like, “My iPhone doesn’t have enough granularity to the volume.” But of course...