Fast Company: How to design the most controversial button on the internet and not screw it up. “In high-stakes moments—like when Trump tweeted praise for insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol—edited tweets need to be understood at a glance, and burying changes deep in the UI doesn’t make a lot of sense for a platform that’s designed to be skimmed.”
Chrome Unboxed: More Improvements That Google Play Books Should Make To Its Web App This Year. “I can no longer use my Duet with the Google Play Books app, and instead, I’ve been forced into using the web app in its place. In doing so, I’ve realized just how truly awful the PWA experience is. With all of the advancements and hype around progressive web apps, you’d think that the company would throw some paint on something as important as Books, and maybe even do a few things under the hood. Today, I’d like to take a moment to look at how the service has done over the last 365 days and offer five more major thoughts about how the company can bring Play Books out of the Stone Age.”
Wired: All the Social Media Giants Are Becoming the Same. “Companies are always eyeing their competitors to see what works; that’s just market research. But copycatting on social media has led to platforms that look suspiciously similar, with fewer things that set them apart. It’s harder to know what any given platform is for when they all do the same thing. Which major platform has a news feed, disappearing posts, private messaging, and a live broadcasting feature? That would be … all of them.”
Mashable: There’s an art to the way video games deliver info. A new website celebrates that.. “The newly launched Game UI Database turns an often-overlooked aspect of artful video game design into a headlining star. For most people who play games, on screen accoutrements like ammo readouts and minimaps — not to mention pause menus, inventory screens, and tooltips — are just a part of the scenery. We take them for granted, never really acknowledging that most games would be rendered unplayable in their absence. That’s the thing, too: A good user interface (UI) is supposed to be something that goes unnoticed.”
Smashing Magazine: Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users. “Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. As a bonus, you’ll be designing environments that will also work for you when you get older. ‘Older’ meaning ‘past forty’.” Every Web designer who thinks gray-on-gray text is just swell should be forced to copy this article fifty times.
The Verge: A critical analysis of scroll bars throughout history. “Sébastien Matos has built a fantastic interactive trip through the history of one of the most important UI elements we encounter every day: the scroll bar. He’s recreated, as faithfully as possible, 30 years of scroll bars from some of the top desktop platforms of their day, from Xerox Star to Windows 10.”
Ars Technica: Behold, the most (intentionally) poorly designed website ever created. “Sometimes we take Web and user interface design for granted—that’s the point of User Inyerface, a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web and our digital devices.”
UX Collective: Are you sure? — how user interfaces undermine consent. “As more and more of our human interactions are mediated through software interfaces, our tools should model the good consent patterns that we would expect from decent humans. If the software is being coercive and creepy, we should ask why and change that pattern. Every non-consensual thing a software interface does was designed that way by a human; it can be designed not to do it.”
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