new technologies Articles & Videos

  • Technology Forces Us To Do Things We're Bad At. Time To Change How Design Is Done (at jnd.org)

    Distractibility isn't a human problem; it's a design problem. We need to reverse the normal technological strategy of asking people to fill in for gaps in machine performance. Instead, we should require machines to fill in for gaps in human performance.

  • Design, business models, and human-technology teamwork (at jnd.org)

    Technology is undergoing rapid change, which means that business models must change as well.

  • Augmented Reality: What Does It Mean for UX?

    AR technologies can impact the user experience by decreasing interaction cost, cognitive load, and attention switching.

  • WeChat: China’s Integrated Internet User Experience

    User research finds that tightly integrated services with simple and unified design make people use WeChat; mainly through traditional GUI interactions, not a “conversational UI.”

  • Voice Interaction UX: Brave New World...Same Old Story

    Although voice interaction is markedly different from graphical user interfaces, classic usability principles are still critical to the quality of the user experience.

  • Apple Is Making Us All My Grandmother

    Sometimes the form doesn’t follow function and usability must be sacrificed for the sake of beautiful design and business goals. The iPhone is an example.

  • Smart-TV Usability: Accessing Content is Key

    UX design for television UIs should focus on minimizing user effort and providing quick and smooth access to content.

  • Very Large Touchscreens: UX Design Differs From Mobile Screens

    Only a few mobile-design skills and design recommendations translate well to designing for very large touchscreens, as found in kiosks and other nonmobile use cases. Users’ field of vision, arm motion, affordance, and privacy are a few of the different considerations for such screens with up to 380 times the area of a smartphone.

  • Tablet UX Research From the Pioneer Days

    The PenPoint tablet was ahead of its time and too expensive and heavy, but had gestural syntax and personal-productivity benefits that we can still learn from.

  • Smartwatches Are the Future—But Samsung Galaxy Gear Only Partway There

    The Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch poses unique problems due to the tiny touchscreen. The use of gestures and streamlining content are reasonable solutions, but need to be implemented in a more usable manner.

  • The Paradox of Wearable Technologies (at jnd.org)

    Can wearable devices be helpful? Absolutely. But they can also be horrid. It all depends upon whether we use them to focus and augment our activities or to distract. It is up to us, and up to those who create these new wearable wonders to decide which it is to be. Article available at Technology Review.

  • The Human Body as Touchscreen Replacement

    When you touch your own body, you feel exactly what you touch — better feedback than any external device. And you never forget to bring your body.

  • The Third User or Exactly Why Apple Keeps Doing Foolish Things (at asktog.com)

    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.

  • The Apple iWatch (at asktog.com)

    The iWatch will fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem. It will facilitate and coordinate not only the activities of all the other computers and devices we use, but a wide array of devices to come.

  • Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users

    Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.

  • Hardware Specs vs. User Experience

    Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers.

  • Computer Screens Getting Bigger

    Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024x768 resolution that was long the target for web design.

  • Browser and GUI Chrome

    'Chrome' is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.

  • Kinect Gestural UI: First Impressions

    Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play.

  • Top 10 Reasons the New Google News Sucks (at asktog.com)

    The "New" Google News referred to in this article came out in June, 2010. It was dreadful. They have since, as the altered title of this article suggests, backed off on many of its worse features.