#ux

All too often on my computer, I’ll finish typing something, reach for my mouse, and have no idea where the cursor has got to. Not on the monitor I was looking at. Possibly on the laptop screen, but I’d have to turn my head and check. So I do what I always do, shake the mouse until macOS inflates the cursor to the size of a dinner plate, and carry on.

I was waiting for Claude to answer a token-heavy question at work the other day, the little “Thinking…” label flickering into “Wibbling…” and then “Moseying…”, and I caught myself doing the thing I always do when a spinner takes too long, staring at it, trying to divine meaning from the word choice. Is it nearly done? There’s no percentage, no bar, just a word standing in for “trust me, something is happening.” It sent me down a rabbit hole into where progress bars came from, and it turns out they were never really about progress at all.

Icons work because they’re fast. One glance, immediate meaning, no reading required. The tradeoff is that they compress complex information into a single symbol, and compression always drops something.

I’ve spent the last five years reading picture books with my kids at bedtime. Hundreds of them - and I’m still going, even as my eldest moves on to chapter books. One thing has consistently driven me mad: I often can’t read the words.

I’ve been trying to find resources on the subject of User Experience and User Interface design in Virtual Reality a lot lately, as I’m thinking about Google Cardboard, and preparing demos for a talk about using JavaScript to build Google Cardboard experiences.

Scrolling on the web is something that we take for granted when thinking about how users will interact with our website. There are two schools of thought on the subject: one that’s ingrained in how we interact with what we’re seeing on our screen, and the other ingrained in how we interact with the real world.