usability

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Mike Monteiro's CreativeMornings talk on getting paid for creative and freelance work, covering contracts, working with lawyers, and refusing to work for free. It is delivered with blunt humor.

Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

Mike Monteiro's Creative Mornings talk "Fuck You, Pay Me" with his lawyer Keith Levine, on contracts, scope creep and making sure designers and freelancers get paid. This copy has Portuguese subtitles.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

Kelly Starrett's Talks at Google presentation on staying healthy while desk bound, mixing anatomy and practical mobility advice. It shows how to set up a desk and sit and move to avoid pain.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Razbuten has his wife, who has never played games, try a sampling of titles and shows where she struggles. It highlights unspoken game conventions that experienced players take for granted.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

A Google Tech Talk by Sebastian Deterding on gamification. It looks at what points and badges get wrong and what lessons game design offers for non-game applications.

Matthew Griffith, creator of elm-ui, presents a toolkit for designing layouts in Elm as an alternative to CSS. He explains the opinionated approach to layout and styling.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj exposing how tax-prep companies like TurboTax make filing confusing and costly even though many Americans can file for free. It combines comedy with reporting on lobbying and dark patterns.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen argues that CSS Grid changes web layout, showing how to place content in cells independent of HTML source order and reshape layouts with media queries. It makes the case for using Grid now that browsers support it.

WSJ's Joanna Stern interviews Apple's Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak at WWDC 2025 about Siri's delays, AI strategy, the Liquid Glass redesign in iOS 26, iPad versus Mac, and tariffs.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

Andrew Price presents at the Blender conference on the problems, politics and possible fixes for Blender's user interface, followed by a full Q&A. He argues that an interface upgrade is overdue.

A HOPE XI talk on programming by voice with open source speech recognition. The speaker writes Linux systems code by voice and describes building custom voice grammars as an alternative to the keyboard for programmers with repetitive strain injuries.

Linus Tech Tips starts a series in which Linus and Luke move their home workstations to Linux. This episode has each pick a distro and try to get a game running on it, and Linus ends up breaking his Pop!_OS install.

Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.

Sal Khan interviews Elon Musk in a 2013 Khan Academy entrepreneurship series. Musk discusses PayPal, rocket efficiency and reusability, and how he approaches education and learning.

Thunderf00t's critique of SpaceX's claims, arguing its launches are not actually cheaper than competitors or the Space Shuttle. It questions the economics of reusability.