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...

MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (audio or video) sometimes has a fun “Did they even test this?” section. This week, for the first 12 minutes, the team was ranting about various volume controls – a meandering conversation that I also found just very enjoyable. The cited answer to “why do a lot of car volume controls max out...

I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc… …and in new to-do items: This bothered me for two reasons. First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or...

Nice, clear, simple copy in ClarisWorks from 1997: No “Maybe later.” No “Not now.” Thirteen characters. Now, Later, Never. (Can’t help but notice that Esc and ⌘. – the classic Mac’s equivalent of Esc – still map to Later, however. Also, this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to...