#ui (151 links)
- LukeW | Little Bits of Intelligence lukew.com
Big AI models like ChatGPT and Claude get all the attention, but the continually increasing amount of fast, low cost models means today's software can embed little bits of intelligence anywhere they're needed. And when software can think, we can rethink the UI of software.
- UI components for AI agents aicss.dev
Everything an agent shows mid-conversation: thinking states, tool calls, streaming text, tables and more.
- Zag zagjs.com
Finite state machines for building accessible design systems and UI components. Works with React, Vue and Solid.
- The Digital Omotenashi Edition - by Colin Nagy whyisthisinteresting.substack.com
Are there experiences of digital done well, and with a similar mindset? As it turns out, it’s already happening—in small places, and mostly unnoticed, which is, of course, exactly the point.
Let's take a look at everything new in Google Stitch to find out if it's just more hype, or if it really is a gamechanger for UI/UX design.
- WebHaptics haptics.lochie.me
Haptic feedback for the mobile web. Supports React, Vue, and Svelte.
- The median delay between human speakers during a conversation is 0ms (zero) | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
An interesting fact I learned at the time: The median delay between human speakers during a conversation is 0ms (zero). In other words, in many cases, the listener starts speaking before the speaker is done. You've probably experienced this, and you talk about how you "finish each other's sentences".
Top voice agent facts
- Nicolas Bustamante on X: "10 Years Building Vertical Software: My Perspective on the Selloff" / X x.com
When the interface is a natural language conversation, years of muscle memory become worthless. The switching cost that justified $25K per seat per year dissolves. For many vertical software companies, the interface was most of the value. The underlying data was licensed, public, or semi-commoditized. What justified premium pricing was the workflow built on top of that data. That's over.
Some truth in this but lacks nuance.
- Introducing A2UI: An open project for agent-driven interfaces - Google Developers Blog developers.googleblog.com
A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents. A2UI allows agents to generate the interface which best suits the current conversation with the agent, and send it to a front end application.
- Notification messaging | Primer primer.style
Picking a notification message for an experience can be tricky. Reference this flowchart to help pick the best component for your feature. For more nuanced scenarios, reach out to the Primer team.
Wonderful flowchart on this page.
- The Best Interfaces We Never Built - Christopher Butler chrbutler.com
The best interfaces we never built aren’t just sleeker screens — they’re fundamentally different approaches to creating that unique space for thinking, communicating, creating, and experiencing that makes technology truly exciting. We’ve spent two decades consolidating everything into glass rectangles. Perhaps it’s time to build something different.
I'd like to explain why it really is time to send the DOM and its assorted APIs off to a farm somewhere, with some ideas on how.
- Ephemerality in User Interfaces borretti.me
And so the trend in UI design, for the past 15y, has been towards less information, fewer affordances, and turning free-standing pages into transient modals. Interfaces are stripped, made ephemeral, and apps become Fisher-Price toys for users to paw at.
- Computing inside an AI willwhitney.com
I propose a new mode of interaction, where models play the role of computer (e.g. phone) applications: providing a graphical interface, interpreting user inputs, and updating their state. In this mode, instead of being an “agent” that uses a computer on behalf of the human, AI can provide a richer and more powerful computing environment for us to use.
In this video, I cover why this "cluttered and weird" design is necessary, how physical space correlates with Chinese software design, why Chinese users might prefer mobile over desktop altogether, and how all of this impacts us.
- The Gen AI Bridge to the Future stratechery.com
This, I think, is the future: the exact UI you need — and nothing more — exactly when you need it, and at no time else. This specific example was, of course, programmed deterministically, but you can imagine a future where the glasses are smart enough to generate UI on the fly based on the context of not just your request, but also your broader surroundings and state.
- Orbit CSS Radial Framework zumerlab.github.io
Create radial interfaces using only CSS.
- AI vs. Metaverse: Which Is the 5th Generation UI? uxtigers.com
My suggestion for separating the wheat from the chaff is to look at what works for customers in user testing. Does the hyped idea help real users perform useful tasks more efficiently or pleasantly? If so, real-world uptake is likely. Does it look fabulous in demos but fail to help people perform tasks? If so, it’s probably hype that will suffer a well-deserved death within the year.
Hint: it’s not metaverse
- The Sound of Software notboring.software
When done right, sound unlocks a path to much richer software experiences
- Redefining Digital Interaction: The Future of Adaptive Interface Design blog.goldfoot.com
Useful to define a term. More edge-finding required.
- Introducing Generative Canvas: Dynamically Generated UX, Grounded in Trusted Data and Workflows blog.salesforceairesearch.com
Kind of mindblowing contextual, generative UI.
- Sanding UI - Jim Nielsen’s Blog blog.jim-nielsen.com
This is the way to do it. It's also what tends to get cut in most ticket-focussed orgs.
- LukeW | Different Gets Ignored lukew.com
Instead of making elements visually distinct to be noticed, designers should focus on integrating important elements seamlessly into the user interface. This ensures that crucial actions and information are perceived as part of the overall user experience, rather than distractions to be dismissed.
- Dark mode & accessibility myth by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer. stephaniewalter.design
Let’s talk about dark mode and accessibility! There’s a myth that dark mode is good for accessibility, because it improves text readability (among other things). As always, when it comes to accessibility, it’s not black or white (haha, color pun intended). We can’t really generalize, so, the answer is often, “it depends”, dark mode can make it better for some users, but not all of them.
- Visual design rules you can safely follow every time anthonyhobday.com
- AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years uxtigers.com
Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back
- Building like it's 1984: A comprehensive guide to creating intuitive context menus - Height height.app
So as you can see, building context menus is quite a bit more complicated than it looks from the outside!
Another good "UI is more complex than pictures" example.
- The Design Philosophy of Great Tables posit-dev.github.io
Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.
- Generative UI and Outcome-Oriented Design nngroup.com
GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.
- The Shape of AI shapeof.ai
Companies are reacting by “doing AI”without prioritizing the experience of the people on the receiving end–Design is more important than ever. To respond, we must get smart, fast. This starts with understanding the emerging patterns of interaction, affordances, and heuristics in an AI world.
Modern UI teams are designing components first; Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow. As we learn to craft systems rather than pages, we must invest effort into shaping these often missed states of design and create with a component lifecycle that can support everyone.
Old but gold
- UI = f(statesⁿ) | daverupert.com daverupert.com
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
- I is for Intent — Acko.net acko.net
This is a slightly problematic article, but worth noting: so few people write about the complexity of UI in a useful way. Organisations too often treat visual design as being as good as done, missing all the nuance behind great UI.
- Spatial Computing hypercritical.co
The success of the GUI was driven, in large part, by the fact that our entire lives—and the lives of all our ancestors—have prepared us with many of the skills necessary to work with interfaces where we see things and then use our hands to manipulate them.
Is Apple now locked in a habit of porting their ecosystem from screen to screen to screen? And, as a result, tethered to too many constraints, requirements, and paradigms about what an app is and we should interact with it? Were they burned by skeuomorphic design and no longer want to push the user interface in non-conventional ways?
Has an interesting comparison with Meta's Ray Ban glasses: "The only user interface is your voice and a single hardware button."
None of the available AI devices overcomes all three challenges. Those that look pretty, like the r1, the Pin or Meta’s Ray-Bans, seem to be peripherals more akin to AirPods than the iPhone. Independently useful ones like the Vision Pro or the Quest are dorkier than Google Glass, and much clunkier.
Crucially, none of the React alternatives solve this, indeed, they mostly just make it worse by trying to "helpfully" mutate state right away. But here's the annoying truth: you cannot skip learning to reason about well-ordered orchestration. It will just bite you in the ass, guaranteed.
Fun rant on current state of React and advanced UI.
- The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design cs.umd.edu
I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three decades, require validation and tuning for specific design domains.
This is wonderful.
- How to (properly) break your design system breakyourdesignsystem.com
Systems thinking allows your work to reach more people.
- Toggle-Switch Guidelines nngroup.com
Toggle switches should take immediate effect and should not require the user to click Save or Submit to apply the new state. As always, we should strive to match the system to the real world.
- The OpenAI Keynote – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
The best UI, though, is no UI at all, or rather, just one UI, by which I mean “Universal Interface”.
... or more accurately: bad mobile-first web design.