The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

A bubble is a fully editable and interactive view of a fragment such as a method or collection of member variables. Bubbles, in contrast to windows, have minimal border decoration, avoid clipping their contents by using automatic code reflow and elision, and do not overlap but instead push each other out of the way. Bubbles exist in a large, pannable 2-D virtual space where a cluster of bubbles comprises a concurrently visible working set. Bubbles support a lightweight grouping mechanism, and further support connections between them.

A quantiative user study indicates that Code Bubbles increased performance significantly for two controlled code understanding tasks. A qualitative user study with 23 professional developers indicates substantial interest and enthusiasm for the approach, despite the radical departure from what developers are used to.

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. Shadows behind windows help us see which window is active. The physicality of the iPhone’s user interface makes the device more natural to use.

The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable.

How people read websites.

a sexy, non-reversible live visualization of password field input

F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school.

My guess is that if there is any "next thing" in search interfaces, it will come not from smarter UIs, but from dumber ones in which the user does more work - the Graffiti effect. If a small quantity of user effort can produce a substantial improvement in user experience (which is a big if), the user will accept the bargain. Hey, it made Jeff Hawkins rich.

I actually tried many more permutations than I show here. I only discuss the most interesting ones below and describe my thought process along the way.

Hotmap is a visualization tool designed to gain an understanding into how people interact with online maps. It was released internally at Microsoft in 2006 as a research prototype; its use was monitored as it was developed further. A public edition of Hotmap was released in 2007; the authors have collected feedback on that tool since.

Today I presented our work on using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service as a user testing method to PARC's Computing Science Lab (CSL). Several of the researchers in the audience asked "what does the demographic of Mechanical Turk users look like, and whether it is a reasonable sample of the real demographic" that one might want for user testing of HCI systems. I thought that was a great question.

Interface Design Patterns

Reasons why Web 2.0 is genuine, or at least feels as such.

There’s a lesson here for software designers, and one that I’ve talked about recently - we must ensure that we design our applications to remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application.

Working through Screens is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.

Sparklines are "intense, simple, wordlike graphics" so named by Edward Tufte. In lieu of a more detailed introduction, Professor Tufte's site has an early release of a chapter on sparklines.

So what makes good copy good? Perhaps we can find out by considering what’s made the best of the best…the best.

Metadata plugin for Mail.app. It's handy and can be used to integrate Mail.app into an organizational (read: GTD) workflow.

Search for colors complements to your RGB values. Create color harmonies, combinations and themes. From your main (or background) color select trim and accents tones.