Have you ever spent time browsing Edward Tufte’s website? You really should. I haven’t in quite a while, and I was surprised by how much I had missed previously. The man is absolutely spectacular at the art of presenting information usefully, and ...
The single most beautiful thing I have ever borne witness to was a Sigur Ros concert in Seattle back in May 2006. There’s a point in one of their songs, entitled viðrar vel til loftárása, where the lead singer, Jónsi, pauses mid-lyric, holding his...
This month in ACM Queue, John Canny, a distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, poses the question “Is an HCI revolution just around the corner?” Although I generally find breathless prognostications of amazing possibilities Right Ar...
I’m off to not-so-warm-and-sunny San Francisco until Tuesday night. I may have time and opportunity to post, but I’m not counting on it. See y’all Wednesday at the latest! In the mean time, go take a look at the following blogs I read on a regula...
A fantastic blog entry on 37Signals’ Signal vs. Noise explores the complexity of creating effective, simple user experiences: Sometimes there’s a lot more to simple than meets the eye. To the customer, this is just a few obvious words in a small b...
I found a video of the new start menu for KDE on the Web the other day. It’s actually pretty cool; it looks far more polished than previous versions I’ve seen, it’s resizable, and includes some nice integrated search functionality. One complaint ...
I just found a bolus of information on a concept phone produced by Synaptics, makers of touchpads everywhere and Pilotfish, a German/Taiwanese design firm. The concept incorporates some unique elements to enhance usability, such as automatically a...
Every year, Apple celebrates the best-of-breed applications on their platform with the Apple Design Awards, which are presented at WWDC. This year’s winners include the fantastic text editor TextMate and the eBay power sellers’ tool, iSale. The aw...
I recently got into a disagreement with the Director of Marketing for a Seattle startup that shall go unnamed. Her company recently went through a logo redesign project, and got a new default Powerpoint template out of the deal. I think it looks d...
An editorial on MacObserver has an interesting round-up of newer UI metaphors seeing some traction, and some that are a bit futher out there. The author, John Kheit, links out to a ton of interesting content including videos, prototypes, and resea...