How to leverage the power of personal websites to share private information with your direct personal contacts.
A new skillset for interactive designers, who must now take direct evidence into account with every design variation that affects user flows.
Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.
It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.
Tantek is fighting an uphill battle in his quest to rid the world of email. Email is ingrained, ubiquitous, and everywhere. Every person that regularly logs on to Hotmail or Gmail contributes to this…
It gets tiresome when every time someone publishes an article about this issue, a stream of misogynistic trolls start babbling and complaining. You fucking assholes are just proving the point…
This technique been mentioned in passing for a couple of years now, and recently seems to be gaining a fair amount of attention. Many web designers love the idea of building dropdowns like this.…
Was lucky enough today to attend a talk by Ben Bederson, who presented his work on Interfaces for Staying in the Flow, and examples of software that he has developed …
Portigal Consulting talk about the analog human and the digital machine.
The only “right” approach is tweaking a design based on a feedback loop of observation.
“Every time we went down the ‘wrong’ path, we learned something concrete — if not about software than at least about people”
Late to the party, I know, but it's worth pointing this out, as an addendum to previous ranting. hoverIntent is a jQuery plugin that replaces the standard on/off hover switch with a delay, triggering…
Many of us are still conditioned to think of design frameworks in terms of grid systems, Swiss graphic design, and rigid corporate identity systems. The problems with these are similar to the problems…
A fascinating chronicle of introducing the One Laptop Per Child project to a small school in Peru. One particular aspect that really jumped out at me was: On the first day, we also discovered that…
Joel on Software has published the first draft of a short essay on usability, where he makes the salient point that: Something is usable if it behaves exactlyas expected. This principle of usability…
Fragments, factions, and turf warfare may force Digg to accomodate greater personalization of content.
The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.
How to make short text messages more effective.
From Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, which discusses the declining value of blog comments and social news sites: A funny thing about these sites is that they know about this problem.…
Antisocial Networking couldn't have popped up at a better time for me, as I was actually sitting here, struggling with nascent suspicions about the nature of the XFN microformat. I've been designing…
Write Articles, Not Blog Postings could be one of the most arrogant and ineffably crude pieces of writing that Jacob Nielsen has ever published. He starts with reasonable and valid advice: thorough,…
AJAX is not new(s). Previously, I've been critical of the nomenclature, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than anything else, but I have to agree with Simon Willison, who…