There used to be a weather app called Dark Sky, which had the clearest, most informative UI of any of iOS weather app. The inevitable happened: Apple bought the company, and killed the app.
The people who made it are back with a new app called Acme Weather and once again they've absolutely nailed the UI. It's calm, attractive, and presents the most important data clearly and simply. Why can't more app UIs be like this?
Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.
I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!
Software is inert without a human user, even though modern-day "agentic" apps are doing their best to squeeze human agency out of the loop. The focus on the tech and not how it is used has intensified an old phenomenon: interpassivity.
The vision tech has been pushing (software that "uses itself") has created a synthetic replacement for human agency. It is harder and harder to care, and that is by design.
https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/the-newest-term-in-the-ai-lexicon-is-interpassivity
Re: flat web design.
Buttons that don’t look like buttons.
I blew someone’s mind today. She’s about my age, competent at her job, but not much into technology.
She complained that she always needs to scroll past the weeks in her web-based calendar.
I pressed the current date shown in the top-left corner above her appointments, which pulled up a big date overview by month.
She was so excited, asked me how I did that.
Mind you, the date was shown as simple black letters on a white background, with only a black, downwards-pointing chevron a bit to the right. It hardly suggested interactivity, especially to those not knowledgeable about web design.
I often think that flat design was a mistake, and today’s situation was a good example of bad user experience (UX) stemming from non-intuitive controls.
Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves can teach you.
New ALA author Shrey Shah takes us on an amazing journey, showing what happens when assumptions based on constraints become invisible to interface designers.
https://alistapart.com/article/designed-for-a-dead-language/
nr.69
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Robert Finkei
From UX to Contextype
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Wednesday 17 June 2026
19:00 — 21:00 (start 19:30)
at de Lange Adem
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With Robert Finkei, we venture into a corner of type design we haven't explored much before. His background as a UX designer brings a surprising and refreshing perspective to the discipline. Through his project User Type Lab, he A/B tests individual letterforms with users and feeds results back into his typefaces, without ceding art direction to the data. Together with his Slovak school friend and business partner Michal Chrastina, he runs https://Contextype.com, a foundry that is set to release a new typeface very soon.
—
Thanks to @typotheque & PICTORIGHT
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RSVP: https://letterspace69.eventbrite.com
#Lecture #Typography #UX #Amsterdam #Rietveld
🤔 Just found out that X uses Threads-like carousel for media attachments in a post instead of grid now (on iOS, soon on Android and web).
Bsky did that few months (April), reverted, then brought it back (June) only for more than 4 media attachments.
Much of AI "productivity gains" come from managers implicitly trusting an LLM to do a good job, and suspending the onerous micromanagement that humans employees get subjected to.
You can do that without paying Anthropic a single penny. It just requires letting the experts you hired do their jobs.
https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/trust-is-not-built-on-craft-alone
#LLM #AI #tech #UXDesign #UX #SoftwareDevelopment #USerresearch
I'm in one of those, a touch screen is the worst design ever made, moods. Why anyone in my generation accepted this and thought this was a good idea is beyond me.
For the sighted folks following me, a bit of a history.
In recent iOS upgrades for me there has been a vast disconnect between navigation and typing. When typing, keys just don't register, keys are slow to process, keys are just sluggish in general when typing on the virtual keyboard. It is madenning.
I hear it is the same on the Android side, so this isn't just an Apple thing.
Despite navigation being fine, still, I'd even argue that to sighted folk, sometimes, a touch interface just doesn't work.
I'm a pretty good typist but it took me thrice as long to compose one of my lengthy text messages asking a very important question, than when I used my PC to send an SMS message. Why did our generation believe typing on glass is cool. Nobody can type on glass.
I'm a very skilled typist and it takes me nearly 10 minutes to fiddle with the awful latency on the keyboard running VoiceOver. Navigating the phone is better, somewhat, but Apple fucked up typing speed forever I feel and I am not even sure what they did.
This is a problem with all mobile phones, I feel, not just Apple.
I've heard from sighted folks the virtual keyboard doesn't work for them either.
#UX #Apple #Rant #Rants
Welp - since search basically everywhere has turned into "I see your suggestion in my input field, but how about I show you a shitload of stuff entirely unrelated to it?" it just occurred to me that the young folks out there probably don't even realize that originally, a search field was for entering the thing you wanted to find *and then the engine would present you with that thing* if at all possible & if it wasn't, it would just tell you that.
New blog post: The Case for Tri-State Dark Mode Toggles
"There’s much to improve about search and discovery on Mastodon, and we finally have the technical foundation to build a better solution."
Great read, thank you for sharing @imanijoy @Mastodon!
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/08/discovery-week-2026-what-we-learned-and-what-were-doing-next/
via https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/117043346514398510
#mastodon #fediverse #MastodonDiscoveryWeek #SocialMedia #design #UX #UXUI
