★★★★☆ (as a TV show) ★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog) 2024 / 4 episodes ~50 minutes each During my year at Code For America, I saw many glimpses of truly bad technology – slow courtroom computers, infuriating interfaces, obsolete specs, and the inevitable layer of remote access GUIs atop it all that made...

An extremely bad click-through experience in Vimeo: a whole lot of redundant text, and a double captcha (luckily you only have to click on one). Put the little captcha box in the middle of the screen and that’s it. Nothing else feels necessary. A great example of an insecure interface. #complexity #interface design...

I have never before heard of this story of an absolutely botched deployment of a new accounting system at the British post office, and “the widest miscarriage of justice in UK history.” More on Wikipedia: Between 2000 and 2015, 736 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the UK Post Office, with many falsely convicted and...

You might not encounter them often in polished fonts unless you’re knee-deep into typography, but: fonts have bugs, too. Paul van der Laan on Mastodon: Did anyone ever notice that Avenir LT has some serious errors in the descender lengths of p and q in certain weights? Florian Hardwig adds: It’s one of the things...

The first iPhone famously introduced the soft keyboard, which could change its shape depending on the need. Sometimes it would mean becoming a keypad (for numeric entries), and sometimes something subtler, like introducing a “.com” key to the bottom row, or adding a new column of keys and making the keys a bit more...

Perhaps the only ever musical that’s about a buggy piece of software. From the inimitable Cabel Sasser, this 2006 video about Saints Row, with three songs and a goddamn reprise at the end. It’s very good. my car door’s freaking out it seems to be forever in the concrete barricade I wonder how I’m ever gonna drive...

Was always so inspired by this pattern in Mac OS – showing me an extra bit of information only and exactly when it was needed: I just saw a version of it in Nova, the text editor: #details #interface design #nova

I hope it’s okay for me to link to my work once in a while. Today, I published a photo essay about my favourite tech museums. A lot of it doesn’t have to do with software, but in general it’s about craft and good user experience in this specific context. If you are interested specifically in software, the ACMI part...

Yet another good post by Nikita Prokopov, continuing the theme of icons in Mac OS Tahoe (previously), going into more depth: In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. ¶ But even if there were, the premise...

This still remains one of my favourite pieces of UI ever designed. I know this is is not software, but this to me is exactly the right kind of “delight” in this context. (Apologies for a shoddy video.) #real world

A really fun 2021 story by Fabien Sanglard at the perfect-for-me intersection of bugs and typography. In 1991, just days before the final deadlines, Akira Nishitani, one of the graphic designers of the absolutely seminal arcade game Street Fighter II realized they misspelled the world “Warrior” as “Warrier.” The...

One of the frustrating patterns for me is a dialog box that doesn’t offer “skip it next time” option, or even just defaults to remembering. My go-to examples? Apple’s Remote Desktop which always throws this thing up on connection: And this in Photoshop upon saving a PNG file, which has been there forever: I never...