The basic rule is: 10 to 15 words per line. For liquid layouts, at 100% font size, 50% column width (in relation to window size) is a good benchmark for most screen resolutions.

Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution.

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.

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

Because each website appeals to its audience differently, the prudent user experience designer takes a measured approach when communicating, especially when they do so on behalf of their client. No matter what the vision and no matter how it’s executed, a design can always communicate more effectively.

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.

This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way.

RT @AndyIrvine: Perhaps the best article on digital design I've ever read. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1133. Perhaps.

"Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be."

This cluttered, ad-heavy, paginated article is exactly why we need Safari Reader, Readability, Instapaper et al: http://j.mp/bmKhDE

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

"These inspectors (for Keynote and Microsoft Word on the Mac) are difficult to use because they show all possible editing controls at once, disabling those which don’t apply to whatever is selected. It’s not easy to find which options apply to what you’re editing at the time, and the density of controls requires the pixel-precision of a mouse pointer and considerable screen space to display.

On the iPad, any globally-positioned inspectors should nonetheless be contextual in terms of what editing UI they show. Don’t overload the user with irrelevant options; hide anything that doesn’t apply. [...] The guideline is simple, and it’s good advice even for the desktop:

*Inspectors should present context-relevant UI.
*Hide controls which don’t apply to the selection or focus.

The concept of context is key to iPad software design."

"We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign."