Once you have thousands of items, you don't have a pagination problem. You have a search and filtering problem. Why are we presenting hundreds or thousands of items to the user? What does that achieve? In a perfect world, every search would result in a page with a single item: exactly the thing you were looking for.
Is it the time to finally give up on pagination?
Another one of those futuristic videos that are creepy in their inhumane sterility.
By clearing the interface of all unnecessary elements and using the content as the design core, the team has been able to distinguish this OS from more traditional UIs: the interface disappears, and the content itself becomes the interface. The interface shows the actual content and is not just the means to get to the content. Reducing the visuals on the phone promotes direct interaction with the content.
An overview of new design system from Microsoft. I don't know if it's going to fly, but wish it to succeed. That's why I'd be much happier if it was executed by Apple instead of Microsoft.
Alas, the progress bar is a necessary evil. "Unfortunately, there will always be computer programs that cannot be executed instantaneously," wrote Myers in his bizarrely engrossing 1985 paper, "The Importance of Percent-Done Progress Indicators for Computer-Human Interfaces." Today, that statement holds true: "As long as there have been computers, there have been computers that don't run fast enough," Myers tells PM. "When there's more computer power available, there's more desire to use it." He adds: "[Progress bars] would stop only if human progress stops." I can't quite tell if this is an optimistic view of the future or an incredibly depressing one, but I suspect it's right.
Philosophical look at the progress bar.
Incredible effort has been put into interaction design recently. Unfortunately, all that effort has been targeted towards inexperienced users, pretty much ignoring those of us who use computers for hard work, who run the show behind the scenes.
Command line is incredible powerful interface that has been neglected in the last 20 years of rapid progress in UI design. The article explores this interface and ideas how it could be improved. They seem rather vague, but the subject indeed is interesting.
To take this to an extreme, imagine that you're completely blind. Yeah, that's a tough life, but you can still pretty much take care of yourself and do the things that people do. Do you know what it's called when you lose all sense of touch? It's called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.
Visions of the future, like the one published recently by Microsoft, are not only creepy, but also limited and narrow in presenting what's possible. The article analyses tactile interactions possible with our hands, neglected in Microsoft's video.
There are a few side affects to this surge of realism. I think that there is an Uncanny Valley in interface design that some Websites and applications have landed themselves in through approaching interface design in the wrong way. The Uncanny Valley of interface design might not cause something disturbing, but the user experience can be compromised.
Inconclusive post about the realism in user interface design.
So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.On touch devices like iPhone or iPad :hover and mouseover state are not reliable anymore. But that doesn't mean they're completely useless now. 37signal's designer Ryan Singer argues that proliferation of touch interfaces won't eliminate desktop-specific metaphors but will rather increase the gap between the two worlds.
Remember user interface that kept Tom Cruise fit in Minority Report? Well, it's real. One thing that seems to be overlooked is how lazy people are – waving your hands all day can be thus pretty challenging task for computer crowd.
For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don't know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don't even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we're back to this square one.
Nielsen on iPad's usability. In short: the interface beautiful, but suffers from lack of standardized controls and metaphors.
Of course it didn't take the members of “Nielsen is a boring guy who just don't get” camp too much time to come up with a rebuttal:
He almost gets it.
