“groovy mother...”

Don Norman on search boxes being the command lines of today.

I saw the demo of this last year at ETech, and it was mindblowing. We’re inching closer to the Minority Report user interface.

Some very clever ideas about visually alerting users to the existence of microformats on a web page, plus some interesting debate in the comments about how much Firefox should visually change the look of a page in the name of “usability”.

Really interesting concepts in changing the history tab in Firefox (which is currently near useless for finding something you remember from a couple of days ago).

Java GUI look & feel which resembles a UI sketched out on the back of a napkin. Intended for use when demoing prototypes to customers.

Wow. Microsoft make it clear that, however rushed, buggy and miserably unready the Zune software may be, the user experience design was always half-assed.

I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).

Eyetracking survey recommends placing labels above-and-flush-left with inputs on web forms.

Wicked-nifty Javascript UI library, generously open-sourced by Yahoo. Using this with Django and Lucene, I was able to knock out a pretty decent AJAXy autocompleting search box within 24 hours of opening my big yap in a meeting and suggesting it as a feature. (The “Design Pattern Library” is also worth a read to anyone who juggles HTML)

CD burner for Mac. Fairly boring idea, sure, but the UI is a gorgeous example of minimalism.

Dan takes on the new iTunes UI.

A smattering of free/shareware OSX apps with to-die-for UIs.

The impending rumble of Office 2007 UI-a-likes is somewhat terrifying.

MS unveil their new UI for Office. Curious to see how this works in real life, but the photos look like usability could go either way.

I’ve really been enjoying this blog, tellings stories about the planned (radically different) UI for the next version of Microsoft Office. It’s been many years since I’ve been anxiously looking forward to getting my hands on a beta copy of *Office*!