As a designer, using Notion is a great opportunity to critique a complex interface. Yes, it’s unfair on the XDs at Notion (if indeed there are any, and I have my doubts…) for all the reasons that I’d hate some outsider dumping on my stuff without them knowing the constraints I was under. But it’s…
Tag: interaction design
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping out with our corporate blog, a Medium publication. Medium is utterly awful for the purpose of corporate blogging. Disclaimer: Some of the things described here are so molar-crushingly bad that I suspect they are in fact not true. Perhaps it’s the lack of any detailed documentation…
The use of “toggle” switch UI in place of check boxes has been growing in popularity over recent years, and is approaching a convention in some contexts (particularly mobile). But there is a problem with them that designers should bear in mind:
Ever since Amazon removed their navigation from their checkout screen, it has been said that transactions (or other critical tasks the business would prefer the customer to complete) should not have “distracting” navigational elements on the screen. This is because those elements could take people away from the task at hand and erode conversion. Not…
At the trainspotting end of the UX spectrum of activity lie articles like this, from Information Architects Inc., which for some reason I find myself reading. While IA’s article is far too long and badly needs editing, the following occurs to me:
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
I’ve blogged before about how I think calendars are to dates what pie charts are to numbers, but recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about this issue. The background to this was a discussion I had several months ago around the pros and cons of using calendars for date range selection, for example in booking a hotel. As with many design issues, this is one heavily encrusted with tradition and gripped by the dead hand of the “design pattern.” In…
… Tim “Incidentally, my favourite change is the fact that they’ve finally got delicious.com and not that damn domain I could never remember.” I though that was just *me* :)…
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it becomes particularly frustrating for designers when a sub-optimal pattern then gets in the way of better designs because the pattern be…