Different definitions of affordance that have developed are explained in the following sections. The original definition described all action possibilities that are physically possible. This was then refined to describe action possibilities of which an actor is aware. The term has further evolved for use in the context of HCI as indicating the easy discoverability of possible actions.

I should start by saying I am by no means a Keynote ‘pro’ compared with many of our web team who could use it in their sleep. In fact, when I first started working at ESPI last July, I was very surprised to find out that designers were using Keynote for laying out presentations. My surprise turned to alarm when I found out that they were also using it as a design tool to build UI designs for websites and apps. It turns out that I was absolutely wrong. Keynote is an incredibly powerful design tool. Less then one year later, I now rarely (if ever) use InDesign to layout presentations, and I have started using Keynote almost exclusively for any web layouts I do. And not just UX wireframes, but full UI designs. On a recent project, I also used it for poster mock ups, banner designs and a bunch of other formats.

Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons.
Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

Edward Tufte on the user interface of some Sun software: "Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable -- and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.

This is androidpatterns.com, a set of interaction patterns that can help you design Android apps. An interaction pattern is a short hand summary of a design solution that has proven to work more than once. Please be inspired: use them as a guide, not as a law.

Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen "kiosk" mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement in human-computer interaction and ergonomics which predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer display using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.

Were the save and share changes all we’ve been doing for the last few months? Not at all. A lot of the changes you shouldn’t see at all as they’re general code performance and maintenance changes that tend to go out with a release of this size. We’ve also been working on other features that aren’t quite ready yet, but most of the core code is ready and will make deploying those changes that much easier once the remaining parts are in place. Beyond those, there were 100 small tweaks throughout the site. Those range from the obvious addition of the Yahoo! logo to adding ‘untagged’ as a bookmark filter in the ‘Display Options’.

Designed by Jory Raphael at Sensible World, Symbolicons are a family of royalty-free vector icons and symbols for (most) any use.

This is what iTunes looked like before the update and directly after (no changes made to the interface after 10 was installed.)

Please either add the ability to retain fonts (and all their settings) when importing Keynote, Pages, and Numbers documents from computer to iPad, or else please create a simple font management tool for the iPad that allows us to import a reasonable subset of our fonts to the device.

"This is a pretty unusual UI element. Gmail may be the only application using anything like it." Opinions vs. Data: http://j.mp/aBkEoC

Last month I compiled an overview of why software designers were turning to Apple's presentation software, Keynote, to design application interfaces. Several of you asked for more so... here's additional reasons to design in Keynote and lots of tips for getting the most out of it.

Recently, an increasing number of designers (myself included) are turning to Apple's presentation making software, Keynote, to design and prototype software applications. Here's a few reasons why and some tips learned along the way.

Once you use Apple’s Keynote for wireframing, you’ll roundhouse kick your other wireframe tools in the face.

Pull-to-refresh makes sense in a Twitter client because it gives the impression that you are infinitely scrolling the table view. When you reach the top of the table and pull down it down further, you are rewarded with new tweets. For many, it feels like a natural interaction. For me, however, it’s the one of the reasons I don’t like or use the official Twitter app. Pull-to-refresh feels much more work to reload a tweet stream than a simple button tap like Twitterrific or Birdfeed.

All the iOS icons required: "Let’s say you’re working on an icon for an iOS app. The app is universal, so it should run on all iPhones (and iPod touches), and on the iPad. As a designer, you’re used to drawing icons at various sizes; this is a big part of what “icon design” is (as opposed to other types of illustration)."

So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.

Are complex gestural user interfaces a throwback to the command line? http://bit.ly/cKp4l2 #ipad #gesture #ui