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Google+ Snapseed help overlay showing meaning of symbols as well as gestures

First Principles of Interaction Design (Revised & Expanded)

The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments, the web, mobile devices, wearables, or Internet-connected smart devices. Help! This is a huge revision. I expect I have made mistakes. Please leave corrections and suggestions in the Comments at the end. If you have better examples […]

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Providing Predictable Targets

Three principles form a foundation to the graphical user interface: Discoverability, Stability, and Visibility.  They stand in stark contrast to MS-DOS and the earlier generation of interfaces, and their presence swept all of those others away. All three principles were so ingrained in the culture, so absolutely inviolate, that I eventually dropped all of them entirely […]

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The Third User

or Exactly Why Apple Keeps Doing Foolish Things Apple keeps doing things in the Mac OS that leave the user-experience (UX) community scratching its collective head, things like hiding the scroll bars and placing invisible controls inside the content region of windows on computers. Apple’s mobile devices are even worse:  It can take users upwards […]

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The Martian Watch

The Apple Watch, Tog’s Feb 2013 Prediction

Two years plus before the release of the Apple Watch, I set out my expectations of its capabilities and features. This was at a time when  “smartwatches” ran little more than recycled feature-phone software tied together with cumbersome interfaces. The article is just as it was in February, 2013. All I have done since then is to […]

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