Last week I tweeted this: Until a design is good, it is shit. After decades as a designer, I still struggle psychologically with this. I’ve been a designer all my professional life, and throughout that time I would often hit a phase of despair, where I feel like a fraud…

I want to belong to a “church” where, from 10–12 every Sunday, I sit in silence in a congregation of others who are here, like me, to read a book without distraction. We bring our books with us, whatever we want to read — perhaps something difficult, that needs the…

I have very little nostalgia for the old Design Museum building. Its location near Tower Bridge was always a real effort to get to, and while an attractive modernist icon, it always felt small, very much one of London’s “minor” museums — not befitting London’s reputation as a global design…

Back in 2014 I tweeted this: UX axiom: when a feature is invoked more often accidentally than on purpose, it should be considered a bug I’ve been meaning to revisit that statement for a while now. …

I recently went to a fascinating IxDA (interaction design) meetup about in-car interaction design. Here’s a quick summary: 1. Driver distraction and multitasking Duncan Brumby teaches and researches in-car UX at UCL. …

Legendary user experience pioneers and ex-Apple employees Don Norman and Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazzini recently aimed a broadside at Apple in an article titled “How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name”, linkbait calibrated to get the design community in a froth. On the whole I think they are right. Apple’s…

Recently Des Traynor provoked a lot of conversation by saying Some things can’t be wireframed. Many people reacted defensively. I suspect most of us in UX roles still spend a significant amount of our time wireframing. Couple of things are worth bearing in mind: Des works in-house at a product…

I’ve noticed a worrying trend in web navigation lately. More and more websites are hiding their navigation — at desktop resolutions — under a single button, often the 3-bar “hamburger” icon. They are doing this because it makes the website look “clean” — simple and uncluttered. Who wouldn’t want that…

Web page elements that appear or disappear on hover should almost always do so with a slight delay. Why? To prevent distracting elements leaping out at you while your mouse is simply traversing the page. To prevent you from accidentally clicking something that popped into view just as you were…