Baldur Bjarnason
“Adactio: Links—The things of everyday design – Matthew Ström: designer & developer” adactio.com/links/17230
The things of everyday design || Matthew Ström: designer & developer
The evolution of affordances on the web:
The URL for a page goes at the top. Text appears in a vertically scrolling column. A dropdown menu has a downward-pointing triangle next to it. Your mouse cursor is a slanted triangle with a tail, and when you hover over a link it looks like Mickey Mouse’s glove.
Most of these affordances don’t have any relationship to the physical characteristics of the interaction they mediate. But remove them from a website, application, or interface, and users get disoriented, frustrated, and unproductive.
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Related links
Squish Meets Structure: Designing with Language Models
The slides and transcript from a great talk by Maggie Appleton, including this perfect description of the vibes we get from large language models:
It feels like they’re either geniuses playing dumb or dumb machines playing genius, but we don’t know which.
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future by Amelia Wattenberger
Of course, users can learn over time what prompts work well and which don’t, but the burden to learn what works still lies with every single user. When it could instead be baked into the interface.
How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
Proper UI hierarchy · accssible
Bringing gradients back, baby!
This is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand whenever you want a button to actually look like a button.
Nic Chan
What an excellent personal website!
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