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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 91 posts.
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Readability: The Optimal Line Length
The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.
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Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
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Building a professional design tool on the web
Our vision for the future of design tools is one where both the tool and the content are easily available to anyone, anywhere.
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You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
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Round Rects Are Everywhere
Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.
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How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen
How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen We worked with industry-leading casting and directing professionals to narrow down over 400 submissions before selecting the 5 voices.
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The Panic Status Board
This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!
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An Update on Plugin Security
Learn about Figma's response to the security vulnerabilities that were reported in a 3rd-party library that we use for plugin security
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Mac external displays for designers and developers
If you’re considering an external display for your Mac, there’s a few important decisions to make. Apple doesn’t sell external displays any more, so you can’t just default to their wisdom. That’s an issue, because not all displays are well suited for Macs.
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Oklch in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL (2024)
CSS Color Module 4 adds oklch(), and we gain P3 wide-gamut support, boost code readability, and improve developer-designer communication.
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Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?
In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
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10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
Jakob Nielsen's 10 principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.
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Transformers Explained Visually
An interactive visualization tool showing you how transformer models work in large language models (LLM) like GPT.
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Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
Maybe you haven't noticed, but just about every scene in every blockbuster movie has the same color scheme.
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Flat Design: Its Origins, Its Problems, and Why Flat 2.0 Is Better for Users
Flat design is a web-design style that became popular around 2012. It is still widely used today, and its misuse can cause serious usability problems.
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BSI-001: The Perfect Wall
The perfect wall is an environmental separator—it has to keep the outside out and the inside in. In order to do this the wall assembly has to control rain, air, vapor and heat. In the old days we had one material to do this: rocks. We would pile a bunch or rocks up and have the rocks do it all. But over time rocks…
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Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
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Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It
Browse how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business, plus thought-provoking podcasts and films to inspire your inner entrepreneur.
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Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
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Why we skip Photoshop
When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop: You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Pap…
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Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)
Both of these sentences divulge too much of the mechanics of getting the Amaya software. If you want to call your reader to action, use something like:
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Flat UI Elements Attract Less Attention and Cause Uncertainty
In an eyetracking experiment comparing different clickability clues, weak and flat signifiers required more user effort than strong ones.
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Interaction Models
Interaction models move beyond turn-based AI interfaces by handling multimodal, real-time collaboration natively across audio, video, and text.
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Designing Websites for iPhone X
The section below about safe area insets was updated on Oct 31, 2017 to reflect changes in the iOS 11.2 beta.
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Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender
”We finally got a 3D creation tool like paper and pencil.” The reason why Khara, Inc. started moving to Blender.