Interaction Design Articles & Videos

  • Restoring Spring to iPhone/iPod Touch Springboard (at asktog.com)

    The killer app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is the App Store. 85,000+ apps have been written and, via the App Store, 2 billion copies of those apps have been downloaded. Apple gets 30% of the revenue; the developers, 70%. Everyone has been making a lot of money.

  • Apple's Flatland Aesthetic, Part 1: The Mac (at asktog.com)

    Appleland is becoming progressively flatter and, at the same time, less usable. Properly-designed interfaces scale, so that they support the new user as well as the expert.

  • Slashing Subjective Time (at asktog.com)

    The typical web experience is a series of slow, stuttering steps, punctuated by moments of utter boredom. We can do better, and we can do it without faster processors, servers, or networks. How? By taking advantage of subjective time.

  • Progressive Disclosure

    Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

  • Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons

    User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.

  • Improving System Usability Through Parallel Design

    In parallel design multiple designers independently of each other design suggest user interfaces. These interfaces are then merged to a unified design. In a case study, measured usability from version 1 to version 2 was improved by 18% when using traditional iterative design and by 70% when using parallel design.

  • Iterative User Interface Design

    In 4 case studies, the median usability improvement was 165% from the first to the last iteration, and the median improvement per iteration was 38%. Iterating through at least 3 versions of a UI design is recommended, since some usability metrics may decrease in some versions if a redesign has focused on improving other parameters.