Link tags: interface

drab

This looks like a handy collection of HTML web components for common interface patterns.

drab does not use the shadow DOM, so you can style content within these elements as usual with CSS.

Nuberodesign > Blog > In Praise of Buttons – Part One

I concur:

Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.

Invokers (Explainer) | Open UI

This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.

Your Website’s URLs Can and Should Be Beautiful - Opus

The key to making a beautiful URL is finding a balance between brevity and clarity. In other words, a good URL is short but not so short as to obscure what it’s pointing to. Put another way, a good URL contains enough information about its related resource to be useful, but not so much information that it drags on and becomes unwieldy.

Personalization

A look at how personalisation works in digital interfaces and real-world objects.

Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower | Big Medium

Josh mashes up design systems and pace layers, like Mark did a few years back. With this mindset, if your product interface are in sync, that’s not good—either your product is moving too slow or your design system is moving too fast.

The job of the design system team is not to innovate, but to curate. The system should provide answers only for settled solutions: the components and patterns that don’t require innovation because they’ve been solved and now standardized. Answers go into the design system when the questions are no longer interesting—proven out in product. The most exciting design systems are boring.

CSS { In Real Life } | Greenwashing and the COP28 Website

Maybe when I wrote about performative performance? Michelle has a prime example:

The low carbon toggle does absolutely nothing.

In fact, worse than nothing. It doesn’t prevent images being downloaded. It doesn’t switch the site to dark mode, or prevent autoplaying animations (e.g. the hero carousel), or reduce resources transferred in other way. All it does is overlay an extra element with a background gradient on top of the large images on the site to give the appearance that those images being prevented from loading.

Kinopio’s Design Principles

Pirijan talks us through the design principles underpinning Kinopio, a tool I like very much:

1. Embrace Smallness by Embracing Code as a Living Design System
2. Building for Fidget-Ability, hmmm
3. Embrace Plain Text
4. A Single Interface for Mobile and Desktop
5. Refine by Pruning

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.

Just normal web things.

A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.

Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:

• Let me copy text so I can paste it.
• If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
• …

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.

AI isn’t the app, it’s the UI - Stack Overflow Blog

In some ways, the fervor around AI is reminiscent of blockchain hype, which has steadily cooled since its 2021 peak. In almost all cases, blockchain technology serves no purpose but to make software slower, more difficult to fix, and a bigger target for scammers. AI isn’t nearly as frivolous—it has several novel use cases—but many are rightly wary of the resemblance. And there are concerns to be had; AI bears the deceptive appearance of a free lunch and, predictably, has non-obvious downsides that some founders and VCs will insist on learning the hard way.

This is a good level-headed overview of how generative language model tools work.

If something can be reduced to patterns, however elaborate they may be, AI can probably mimic it. That’s what AI does. That’s the whole story.

There’s very practical advice on deciding where and when these tools make sense:

The sweet spot for AI is a context where its choices are limited, transparent, and safe. We should be giving it an API, not an output box.

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.

LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content

I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.

This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.

Home | The Component Gallery

Here’s an aggregator of components from multiple design systems.

Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign

So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem

It doesn’t bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.

Yes! Like I said:

Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.

Jack Rusher ☞ Classic HCI demos

At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:

A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.

Our web design tools are holding us back ⚒ Nerd

A good ol’ rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.

Programming Portals

A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes