So You Can Scribble Shit on the Screen

Today Microsoft announced (among other things like Windows 10) Surface Hub.
It’s a bigass TV that accepts multi-touch input.
Why is Microsoft and every other company who makes computers with stylii OBSESSED WITH CIRCLING SHIT ON THE SCREEN?!
From what I can tell over the years this is they only compelling reason to use a stylus. I just don’t get why scribbling notes and circling things is so damn compelling.

Update: More scribbling from their product videos:

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Human Experience

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The Fucking Fold

Design Agency Huge did research on scrolling:

We wanted to know how page design impacts these user behaviors and to what extent visual cues help users scroll below the fold.

To find out, we conducted user testing with 48 participants over 3 days. We did so using unmoderated remote testing to see how this less conventional methodology would compare to mediated testing, our usual approach.
Spoiler: Everyone scrolls.
I’ve been designing websites for 15 years and I’m fucking sick of the fucking “fold”.
I can’t want until “the fold” becomes a non-issue and we can stop talking about it.

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Human Experience

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Platforms & Ecosystems

Following Google’s new guide for switching to Android will put you firmly in the company’s grip.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Google has strong cloud services for managing your mail, photos, contacts, and music. Yet in contrast with Apple’s recently published tutorial for migrating to the iPhone, Google’s strategy is to keep you using its services even if you do move back to the iPhone one day. Its services are also clearly better at migration and present on both platforms, making switching painless.
Wow, Google locks you into it’s ecosystem like Apple.
I’m shocked!
It seems Google and Apple want seamless experiences across all their services on their hardware.
Sounds horrible and illogical.

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Human Experience

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Le Corbusier


That’s a picture of one of the godfathers of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier, vandalizing a French villa in the nude.
The heroes and idols you look up to are people. Fucked up human beings like the rest of us.
This fact doesn’t take away from the brilliant and creative things they may make and say, it’s just a reminder: they’re just people.
Lucky for him 4chan didn’t exist when he was alive.

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Human Experience

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A Life of Ideas

Richard V. Reeves about writing biographies on intellectuals:

When the subject of a biography is a great politician or military leader, the life is what makes the story: what they did, and said, not what they thought. A subject who has had an important and interesting life during interesting times can, in skilled hands, be brought to life like the character of a good novel.
And:
The life of an intellectual, Mr. Ignatieff claims, provides a petri dish for the universal human experiment of thinking, being and doing. It’s a lovely idea. The trouble is that intellectuals seem no better at it than anyone else. They often think great thoughts, while being ignoble characters. Maybe Mill and Berlin and John Dewey were noble characters. But Marx was a serial adulterer, Karl Popper was a pompous narcissist, and Heidegger was a fascist. Elite thinkers, maybe: but as amateurish humans as the rest of us.
Ideas are beautiful. Life is dirty.
It’s just how it is.

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Human Experience

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Yosemite’s Icons

I want to focus on my favorite visual update in Yosemite — the dock icons. Before Yosemite, Apple maintained a system for icon design through a checklist of mostly unstated and understood guidelines paired with a few specific recommendations in the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). With Yosemite, that system becomes more consistent, and regular, yet the HIG remains silent on the specifics.
—Nick Keppol doing an awesome job inspecting the icons in OS X Yosemite

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Human Experience

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Pretty comes later.

This home page case study by John Henry Müller is a must-read for visual designers:

We released Pack last fall with what we thought was a pretty solid homepage. It had all the bells and whistles you’d like to see on a modern product website: approachable hand written headline, custom ambient background video, playful colors, benefit-led descriptions of key features, scroll triggered animations, prominent call-to-action, charming microcopy, responsive, CSS3, HTML5, blah blah blah. All of the things.

Recently we officially switched over to a drastically simplified homepage after A/B testing for 10 days.

The results of this test were surprising and frankly: embarrassing.
User experience design, or UX design, is a necessary skill for UX and visual designers alike.
Remember what Steve Jobs said, design isn’t about how it looks, but how it works.
Pretty comes later. Make sure your shit works first.

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Human Experience

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