Ideas and Discoveries

Memories of a night in Siena remind me what we’ve gained—and what we’ve lost—in the era of the algorithm.

In an interview, Josh Clark previews his keynote for the Delight conference, explaining why magic yields more imaginative interfaces than technological inspiration.

The best technologies disappear into the environment to minimize distraction from the content or experience at hand. Yet we design for distraction, and we call it engagement. When you say “engagement,” I now hear “theft of attention.”

Wareable.com profiled and interviewed Big Medium’s Josh Clark about the risks and opportunities of moving interactions off screen and into the world around us.

As devices multiply, the new opportunity is less about designing individual screens, and more about designing interactions between the devices.

The real luxury of wearing information is not in exposing ourselves to every passing data point but in filtering that data in ways that deliver insight and amplify our humanity.

Smashing Magazine published The Mobile Book this week. I was honored to contribute the book’s final chapter about designing for touch.

New hybrid keyboard-touch laptops and tablets have changed the game. When any desktop machine could have a touch interface, we have to proceed as if they all do.

Back! Done! Cancel! Save! Mobile apps sport a bevy of buttons to dismiss a view, but their proper placement isn’t always obvious. Here are the general rules to follow.

The history of New York City’s aggressive grid of city streets offers plenty of lessons for digital designers.

Jakob Nielsen’s dubious mobile website guidelines make the mistake of assuming that there’s such a thing as “this is mobile content, and this is not.”

Designers often conflate device context with user context—or worse, with user intent. “This is mobile, so they’ll never want to do that.” ”This is mobile, so it’s aimed only at users on the go.” Friends, this is hooey.

The good folks at O’Reilly interviewed me this week about how new technologies change how we should think about interface design as both consumers and designers.

If you want to take advantage of the new iPad’s gorgeous screen (and of course you do), every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places and for lots of people.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. We need a new term for our sprawling landscape of devices.

The folks at Corning put together a heckuva concept video that peeks into the near future of touchscreen interfaces.

Go figure, but pulling someone through a QR code means we have to give people information they actually want or need.