Category: design
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Comfort Noises and Electric Vehicle ‘Soundscapes’
Before noise-cancelling microphones, voice activity detection algorithms, and the crisp audio clarity of modern phone and video calling, lulls in conversation were naturally filled with analogue background noise. These imperfections provided continuity, making silence feel natural. Without them, the silence in digital communication would be unsettling. To address this, synthetic background ‘comfort noise’ is added…
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Locksmiths, Benevolent Deceptions, and the Benefit of Fake Effort
In my last post, I discussed ‘the labour illusion‘—the idea that transparency about the effort involved in a process can enhance our perception of its value. I think of it as the ‘cousin’ of the IKEA effect. More intriguingly, this principle holds true even when the effort and delay is entirely unnecessary and fabricated. We…
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The Labour Illusion, or Why Visible Effort Matters
The accuracy of loading bars has long been a joke: reaching 66% takes mere moments, but 99% to 100% feels endless. Yet, progress bars—designed to offer “operational transparency”—play a key psychological role in building trust and satisfaction. A lot of business and marketing research has gone into identifying ways to improve idle wait times to…
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A Visual Technique Library for Film Shots
From the common to the lesser-seen cinematographic techniques, Eyecandy is a “visual technique library” for film shots. A database of over 5,000 GIFs, organised into around 100 different techniques, you select the technique and you get a short description and a wall of example clips. While I love movies, I’m certainly a cinematography neophyte, so…
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International, Multilingual Eye-test Chart, 1907
At the turn of the twentieth century, in San Francisco, German optometrist George Mayerle created and published the “international” eye-test chart: “an artifact of an immigrant nation—produced by a German optician in a polyglot city where West met East (and which was then undergoing massive rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake)—and of a globalizing economy”. Running…
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Subway Maps of Roman Roads
Sasha Trubetskoy is a “geography and data nerd” who makes data visualisations and maps. His Roman Roads project styles the Ancient Roman road network as modern transit maps. That’s the full Empire, as of ca. 125 AD. Trubetskoy also made similar maps for Britain, Italy, Gaul and Iberia. I recommend clicking through and reading about…
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The Three Important Response Time Limits
There are three important response time limits in user interface design, and this has remained constant since 1968, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Those three time limits? Chess, anyone? It’s worth also looking at Nielsen’s Powers of 10, detailing further time scales of user interaction. My summary:
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Perceptions of Probability and Numbers
Back in 2011 I wrote about “words of estimative probability“; the quantitative ranges we apply to ambiguous words and phrases, based on Sherman Kent’s research for the CIA in the 1960s. In 2015, Reddit user zonination duplicated the study using /r/samplesize. His resulting post in /r/dataisbeautiful made the longlist for the 2015 Kantar Information is…
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Cooking for Engineers, Geeks, and the Impatient
The vast majority of new and original cooking content feels like it comes from YouTube, with few original developments happening on independent sites (although I’ll happily be corrected here, as Wadsworth Constant certainly applies to the vast majority of cooking videos, too). Meanwhile, the long-running joke of a rambling, sombre life story complementing a simple…
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Realism and Abstraction in User Interface Design
User interface designers (and particularly icon designers) could learn a lot from comics and the theory behind them. Taking his cue from Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics, Lukas Mathis looks at how for optimum recognition and in order to aid understanding, user interface elements must find the sweet spot between universality and realism. Like when…