process

Designing for touch means creating direct interactions that shed three decades of abstract desktop metaphors. As designers, that means we have some deprogramming to do.

I couldn’t stop giggling when I saw my ugly mug on this tea towel created by the good folks at Future of Web Design.

A gallery of mobile horrors calls itself “an argument for closed systems,” but more subtly, it’s really an argument that bad taste abounds.

Just ordered “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System” based on an engaging review by Michael Bierut.

I just finished teaching an eight-week class on tapworthy iPhone design and user experience. If you missed it, all 12 hours of video are available for sale.

SXSW spilled over the levees of Austin’s infrastructure, creating logistical headaches that sank the conference. But man, it sure was fun. Also: I gave a talk on iPad app design.

Touchscreens introduce new interface metaphors, as well as new techniques to subtly help our audiences understand how to use our apps. Suzanne offers some useful examples.

Our job as designers is to make complexity uncomplicated. I’m not sure the designers of this seventies-era power plant pulled that off, but the resulting complication sure is gorgeous.

In recent days, several mobile design-pattern resources have passed through the series of tubes which criss-cross my desk.

“What designer has the most elaborate, the most complex, the most beautiful job in the world? It’s the user experience designer, a very special species indeed!”

A look at what’s under the feet of Parisians and New Yorkers.

Keynotopia is a sensational resource for using Keynote to prototype app designs.

Great design, like any other creative pursuit, requires more than an understanding of the rules.

A touchscreen app can provide useful hints about how it works by using a real-world gizmo as its interface metaphor. But when that gizmo is just eye candy, those hints are just misdirection.

Slides, notes, and video from my talks at the Design for Mobile (D4M) conference in Chicago.

Watch my recorded webcast about iPhone app design, or download the slides.

O’Reilly Answers recently posted an excerpt from Tapworthy about the ideal size of iPhone tap targets.

This week at Mashable, I shared some ideas for extending the (alarmingly brief) lifespan of mobile apps. The secret: content trophies, competition, community, and a dash of emotion.