When I was a kid, my older brother taught me a few blues chord progressions on the guitar so he could solo soulfully over me. I accepted this division of labor because my deficient sense of rhythm and pitch was immediately, painfully obvious.
I remembered this last week when I hooked up a USB keyboard to […]

The designs I've been playing around with lately have all put navigation controls at the bottom of the screen (like the Mac Dock).
I was wondering why. A hypothesis: As I've become more comfortable with computers (I'm a late convert), I've started using keyboard shortcuts extensively, so in placing controls at the bottom of the screen, […]

Neilsen has started to track people's eye-movements to explore user experience.
Take a look at one fascinating result (a picture of a web site with areas of user interest indicated in varying intensities of orange)…
The upshot: users tend to scan text more than images, and favor text positioned at the top and the left. Boxed material […]

At the hugely fun animation-themed LA Flash meeting two months ago, I was stunned by the lightning speed with which the presenters jumped around the Flash IDE. They were interface acrobats, as supple as the lemur monkeys swinging on the fake trees at the San Diego Zoo.
Memorized keyboard shortcuts are faster than pointing and clicking, […]