Prototypr

It's worth quoting "Gall's Law" [0] here: > “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” I have this up on my wall and refer to it constantly (for both tech and non-tech challenges). [0]: https://blog.prototypr.io/galls-law-93c8ef8b651e

At Palm, the key user need was managing contacts across devices quickly and easily. In order to address this, Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring with Donna Dubinsky) created a full time job description on the team: “Click Counter”. Her job was to go through each of the core use cases and count EVERY single click it took to achieve that goal. Then she made recommendations on where the friction was and what steps should be eliminated. By focusing on reducing the time it took to achieve every task, the experience became remarkably efficient for looking up a contact, adding a contact, syncing with your PC (1 button press!) etc. https://blog.prototypr.io/what-you-remove-is-more-important-than-what-…

actually material design says otherwise it is just Googlers doesn't follow material design specs https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909ae9e2

I'm bilingual and frequently use English and Arabic together. What I'm used to is that the caret is unchanged. The best setup I've seen out there is web browsers with dir set to auto and using properties like padding-start instead of padding-left. If I start a block with an LTR character the content is automatically left-aligned and vice versa. The annoying issue comes up when you have bidi characters in the middle of RTL (e.g. Comma or exclamation mark), all tools I've currently seen just break, I have no idea where the cursor is, or where it will move to when I press my arrow keys. I would prefer that bidi characters are treated the same way as the paragraph or block they're in. I wrote an article a while back with some GIFs that showcases these difficulties: https://blog.prototypr.io/the-case-of-the-jumping-dot-17f97aab8a4d I've not found any software that gets it all right when it comes to mixed direction content, but for RTL-only then most of the popular word processors (e.g. Google Docs) are quite good with some tweaking. Happy to chat more on this.

Broken windows theory. In case of Linux and Windows you can see their effort to improve things. Their failures and shortcomings stem from either decades of legacy (Windows) or lack of overarching vision and resources (Linux). Whereas MacOS... It has always been billed (and billed itself) as the UI/UX front runner. It was (or was trying to be) polished, consistent, good. Apple had Human Interface Guidelines in as early as 1987[1]. Apple was the definitive yardstick interfaces would be measured by. But in the recent year(s)... Apple has been consistently dropping the ball themselves. When their own first-party apps break almost every single HIG [2], how can one expect third-party developers to create quality apps. When their own third-party apps are locked in to landscape mode (iOS dashboard and iOS books interface), how can one expect third-party developers spend any significant amount of time creating seamless experiences across multiple screen sizes (and Apple’s own Marzipan apps like Newsstand and Home are barely ok at best). When your OS is no better than the competition, what’s to stop people from using the competition (which actually shows willingness to improve). [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interface-guideli… [2] https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P

The point of the HIG is to make everything look and work the same on the platform: https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interface-guideli… > “The purpose of visual consistency is to construct a believable environment for users… The transfer of skills is one of the most important benefits of a consistent interface, especially for beginning users.” pg. 10 > “…consistency makes it easier for a user to learn new applications; it also makes it less likely that a user who follows habits learned from one application will make a disastrous mistake when using a different one.” pg. xi The HIG goes beyond simply expressing principles of what makes for a good UI. The consistency in and of itself allows users to develop an intuition and muscle memory for how their computer will work. That intuition is destroyed when different apps look and behave differently. In that sense, it's better to be less intuitive according to some abstract principle if necessary to achieve consistency. It will take the user longer to understand a "more intuitive" UI starting from first principles than to understand a UI that exhibits the quirks embedded in the HIG they already know.

Hello HN! I’m happy to share my book with you. It’s goal is to help UX/product designers to prepare for job interviews, practice their skills and build designers hiring process at their companies. I believe there is not enough resources for designers to prepare for job interviews (unlike for engineers/PMs). Often designers don’t know what to expect from the interview. On the other side, many businesses don’t know how to evaluate designers efficiently, especially their first design hire. I decided to share my experience of hiring designers at WeWork and my first step was sharing publicly the exercises we used during interviews (https://blog.prototypr.io/product-design-exercises-we-use-at-wework-in… The feedback I received was great. After talking to both designers and employees I decided to write this book that will help both sides to improve their skills, create better expectations and eventually build better products. You can read more about the story behind the book here: https://productdesigninterview.com/story.html Thank you!

> At this point the only OS with a consistent look and feel at all is Mac. Apparently, NOT! Apple's controversial Liquid Glass UI disrupted their long-standing Human Interface Guidelines by prioritizing cinematic aesthetics (transparency, refractions, and blur) over core tenets like readability, contrast, and content deference. Critics highlight that transparent, light-bending panes frequently clash with underlying wallpapers or videos, causing text and buttons to become illegible. This is a HOT topic in recent WWDCs and amongst UI designers.[1] [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/why-apples-liquid-glass-design-is-a-step-bac…

The researcher in me appreciates you pointing that out. Still, the people who invented a technology often aren't the ones to make it widespread. The people who make it widespread deserve at least some of the credit attributed to the people who invented the tech in the first place, just like Apple got with Xerox's UI. https://blog.prototypr.io/how-xerox-invented-ux-ui-design-apple-made-i…

Google. Microsoft. Apple. In the years where "mobile is cool" became a mantra, basically everybody fell for the trend. Several examples in this random blog post that talks about the topic: https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909ae9e2 You asking this means (maybe?) that you're too young to have used the abhorrent default start menu of Windows 8, but yeah, forcing down users' throats the result of tucking what essentially was a mobile design into a 32" desktop monitor was the pure definition of "stupid decisions driven by marketing". And it was not only OSes, too much of the web got "infected" with these design trends that are only appropriate for small screens: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/

That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2]. [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-ui-design-… [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert

I thought the world decided that skeuomorphism was bad in and of itself and was merely a stepping stone to more usable designs? I seem to remember there was something on the front page of Hacker News years ago talking about just how much of a relic it has become because modern design paradigms were just so much better. I tried to find the link but this was the closest I could come up with: https://blog.prototypr.io/i-know-you-like-skeuomorphism-but-youre-wron… ...and then there's this which really brought back (horrible) memories haha: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

Heh: https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-analysis-of…

Neat walkthrough! Last year I actually made an applied-CoreML app to solve sudoku puzzles where MNIST came in very handy. I wrote about it here: https://blog.prototypr.io/behind-the-magic-how-we-built-the-arkit-sudo…

It’s a problem people knew about back when “autopilot” was just for aircraft, not cars. https://blog.prototypr.io/automation-is-making-us-dumber-and-thats-a-g…

https://blog.prototypr.io/google-and-the-resurgence-of-italian-design-… this article might help you understand what they're trying to achieve

It is. There is the link on the end of article: https://blog.prototypr.io/design-principles-for-reducing-cognitive-loa…

It's been decades since Apple had competent compassionate trained UI designers instead of narcissistic showboating cosmeticians, who'd even heard of, let alone read or actually written, Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines from 1978 onward, and aren't just motivated and addled by cocaine and a burning desire to prove to the world they're actually sensitive artists joyfully expressing their deeply unique spiritual creativity and not mere usability engineers navigating difficult tradeoffs and conventions and applying sound scientific principles so users can actually get work done, instead pointlessly changing and hiding practical pixels that were there for reasons they're blissfully unaware of, which they wouldn't give a shit about even if Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Don Norman, and the ghost of Jeff Raskin themselves begged them to, simply to polish their resumes and burnish their egos, by spraying their sweaty cloying musk over every possible surface merely to express their ownership, just like the Cat in Red Dwarf. [But I digress...] Red Dwarf - The Cat - That be mine! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q54lVO7elt0 How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015) https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-n… A history of Apple HIG table of contents – the philosophy and principles https://modelessdesign.com/backdrop/401 Rediscovering Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1987: UX Lessons from the Dawn of the Personal…

> If programming and designing is communication There's a research field called Semiotics of Human-Computer Interaction studying user interfaces from that angle. Developers usually have a technical background from maths or engineering, and often are not aware of the importance of linguistics in our field. Both programming languages and GUIs are languages (artificial, sure, but linguistics also study those) which are used to write expressions that can be read by humans. Semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning, provide methods to analyze how users make sense of the software artifacts (products and tools) delivered to them. One researcher called the user interface a designer's deputy, i.e. a messenger that conveys in its entirety a message that the programmers wants to communicate to the users. This deputy must stand on its own, since it's the only information available to the user. Users then perform sense-making on the symbols in the interface, to infer the meanings of all elements [1]. Notice that the user can't see what each interface element actually does, since they don't have access to the code; they can only guess what it does from the available symbols. If the symbols lead the user to infer an incorrect meaning, communication breaks. [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/how-semiotics-can-help-us-in-ux-on-deconstru…

Never heard of it before! Looking at their website, it does seem like Citationsy is somewhere in-between a full-blown reference management application and one-off bibliography creation applications. What Citationsy does not appear to do is manage inline citations within a Word or Google Docs document. Zotero will let you hit a keyboard shortcut, search for a reference, and insert a citation right in a paragraph (e.g. "(Smith, 2001)") . It then takes care of also adding that citation to the bibliography at the bottom of the document, and keeping the numbering in sync (if your citation style uses numbering). I would only use a reference manager that has a word processor plugin for inline citation management -- and it doesn't look like Citationsy does. To quickly build a bibliography, or just get a properly formatted citation for a single paper, I like https://zbib.org (also from Zotero). Edit: clever, clever, parent poster is the creator of Citationsy. Hello! For more backstory on Citationsy see https://blog.prototypr.io/on-citationsy-4e143bbafc04. Sounds like Cenk has good taste (mentions iA Writer as inspiration). I'll be exploring Citationsy more.

I'm glad you recognize that there isn't a path yet; many people don't! The short answer today is: you have to ramp up on creating content in 3D engines. If you can't build out all of the content yourself, you can't effectively work. That means, to some degree, creating original 2D and 3D assets. The #1 thing Microsoft tells designers who want to work with Hololens, is learn Unity and learn the workflow to deploy Unity content into a Hololens yourself, without developer/engineer assistance. (UnrealEngine4 is the other major option.) As a web-based designer, tools like React VR and A-Frame might be useful, but your tooling there is always going to be a distant second to the established 3D players, and so your content quality will also lag behind. YC's guide: https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-into-vr/ Some other Medium post that wasn't bad: https://blog.prototypr.io/designing-for-vr-a-beginners-guide-d2fe37902… As far as using real hardware, your AR options are kind of limited if you can't afford a Hololens. You could try and find a second-hand CastAR Kickstarter developer prototype headset. You could maybe fake something with the Vive's front-facing camera or the Leap Motion as a camera on an Oculus Rift. You could cobble together a Pepper's Ghost-style Google Cardboard-alike, like Aryzon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aryzon/aryzon-3d-augmented-realit… or this DIY version:…

Learning with Lucy[0], a beginner excel course. ---- curated direct links from searching hackernews / search engines on 'excel' * excel for everything : https://benn.substack.com/p/the-next-billion-programmers * The World Cup of MS Excel : https://archive.ph/DgDYQ * user-centered approach to user functions in excel : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ex… * MS opens up Excel to custom data types with images, arrays and more : https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/2/22759149/microsoft-excel-javascript… * Lambda: the ultimate excel worksheet function : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-exc… * lambda-2d: An exploration of drawingas a programming Language, featureing ideas from lambda calculus : https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/2d-an-exploration-of-drawing-as-pro… * Using Java script functions in excel : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-adds-support… * spreadsheet as software paradigm : https://medium.com/@vlapiner/spreadsheet-is-a-software-development-par… * make excel spreadsheet behave as an integrated development environment (IDE) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY6ri3blTQM * spreadsheets are graphs : https://neo4j.com/blog/spreadsheets-are-graphs-too/ * excel turning machine :…