It used to be that Mac OS was a great operating system for graphic designers since it was the first consumer available operating system with a graphical user interface plus it had great postscript printer and font rendering support. That was back in the late 1980’s. Today it feels like Apple doesn’t care that much about professional users anymore. There’s …
Continue readingAuthor: Adam Z. Lein
Designer & web developer since the mid 1990's starting on the DEC intranet. User experience consultant since 1998. Photographer since 1995. Tech journalist since 2002.Fediverse Profile
The smartest messaging method is not a segregated mess of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Slack, Teams, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, etc.
“Too Long Didn’t Read” Summary: Managing too many messaging apps can cause cognitive overload and contribute to burn-out. It’s smarter to focus on the one system that works with everything everywhere there’s internet and is completely open for you to control and customize on your own within the largest messaging ecosystem on the planet. Collaborative Diversity Type message, press send …
Continue readingGeneral User Experience Design Guidance
This page lists design guideline suggestions backed by logical reasoning that has often been proven in usability studies. Many GUI designers either ignore or don’t know about many of these basic rules that should probably be common sense. Make it “Easy to Learn” and “Easy to use” Always label buttons with text by default Enable theme capabilities and system theme …
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The Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra is still my favorite phone as a photographer
For the past decade or so, my primary criteria for choosing a smartphone has been its camera capabilities. For numerous years after the Nokia Lumia 1020 was released, there was no innovation in smartphone camera capabilities. Happily we’ve finally reached a point where smartphone cameras are better than ever, and here’s my current favorite. If you’re already familiar with my writing …
Continue readingExplaining Windows 11’s Bad Design
Now hold on… when I say “bad design” here, I’m talking about bad design in the context of user experience and human-computer interaction design not the beautiful new immaterial background wallpaper graphics. The new background images and semi-opaque Vista-like windows look great! Human-computer interaction design generally has two important approaches; “easy to use” and “easy to learn.” There’s also the …
Continue reading10 Ways Delta Chat is Better than WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram
With Facebook finally changing how WhatsApp works so that they can profit off of the users (as expected), many people are choosing to switch to other internet messaging apps like Signal & Telegram. We’ve already talked about how naïve that is given there isn’t really anything stopping Signal & Telegram from changing their policies or adding anti-features in the future (they have already). If …
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