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Design & UX

The most popular blog posts about design & ux on Hacker News. 2,346 posts.

Any year
451

Aspect-ratio is great

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a lot of the time learning new CSS features doesn’t involve just learning a what a single property does, more like getting to grips with a collection of properties and how they work together — even learning a whole specification. That’s certainly not a complaint from me: it makes…

453

New Course: The Design of Everyday Things

After reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, I remember thinking to myself, “I probably learned more from this book than I learned from a majority of classes I took in graduate school.” This wasn’t the best feeling in the face of my $60,000+ graduate school loans! My loans feel less painful though …

454

The complexity that lives in the GUI

The user interfaces are a weird thing. There are all sorts of libraries and frameworks that are supposed to help you on your journey of writing a GUI, but despite all the best practices and frameworks forcing you to eat your vegetables, the GUI always ends up being a ridiculous mess. After pondering some more about…

459

Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users

Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? I remember, years ago, working on a mobile web service which had a URl bar - so users could tap in bbc.co.uk on their T9 keypads - and a separate search bar. I thought that was pretty nifty. But it turns out, users tried searching for…

462

Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

This image has three components: On the left is an OCR’ed PDF from my ScanSnap iX500. I have selected most of the text, and on the right side you can see two copy&paste results. In the upper half is the result directly after scanning, right after the bundled ABBYY FineReader that comes with the iX500 did its magic. In…

474

Planetfall

Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…