• The Worst Interface Ever. Available now, a cute little switch to test your mental acumen. Mount it under your car's hood, where it can't be seen. Remember to flip it at just the right moment several times a week. Miss one single time and�blat!�lose a $5000 engine/transmission! What fun! Only $1500, at a dealer near you...
  
  

• Holistic Design: PalmOne Tungsten T3 Case Study. Palmtop sales are sliding. Many industries suffer not because they have a bad product, but because of the surrounding experience.
  
  
• Make Your Tungsten T3 Palm a Monster Machine. Here are software add-ins that make this hot piece of hardware sit up and bark.
  
  
• Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop Online
  Retail e-commerce is still usually a hostile, thoroughly-unpleasant experience. A lot of people have been getting away with murder, murder of their own companies. Here's how your company can stop throwing away money and customers with both hands. (more)
  
  

• Make Your Mac a Monster Machine
  How to equip your Mac today with a handful of simple shareware add-ons to turn it into a high-productivity marvel.. (more)
  
  
• Panther: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly An in-depth look at Apple's OS X 10.3 release. What's working, what's not, and what Apple needs to do about it. (more)
  
  
• Top 9 Reasons Why the Dock Still Sucks The Dock is the most notorious interface element ever to appear on a Macintosh, the first one that is provably bad in almost every way. I systematically review why it is still bad and explain why Apple hangs onto it anyway. (more)
  
  

2003

• When Good Design => Bad Product
  The prototypes looked great and tested well. The programmers did their usual competent job of implementation. The result was a disaster. What went wrong? Someone forgot the last, critical step. (more)
  
  
• D'ohlt #1: Think Globally, Act Globally
  Wherein we discover that, while the interaction designer was making the garden timer really easy to program, the engineers had made it even easier to lose the program. D'oh! (more)
  
  
• D'ohLT #2: Security D'ohLTs
  No computer specialty is as populated by D'ohLTs as is security. From the day their professors begin a course of D'ohLTish instruction, through the day they manage to reveal the most intimate details of your financial or medical records to casual passersby, to the day their ham-handed efforts get you shot, D'ohLTism rules the day. (more)
  
  

• Why We Get No Respect, and What We Can Do About It
  It's time interface designers, or whatever we're calling ourselves, get respect. After 25 years of whining about it, I've finally realized we have only ourselves to blame. Take control. If you look at nothing else of mine this year, please read this, act on it, and pass it on. (more)
  
  Multiple Mistakes Drown Interface
  A reader reports that the interface to GE's electronically controlled dishwasher is less than heavenly. Here's where GE failed, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. (more)

2002

• Core Decisions
  Many products are doomed to interaction failure before the design has even begun. Learn just how far your responsibilites as a designer extend.
  
  
• Airline Security
  Must the "usability" of the air transport system be further degraded in order to provide the kind of security necessary to prevent another incident as occured on September 11th? The answer is an emphatic "no!"
  

2001

• Good Lawyers, Bad Products
  Lawyers may know their way around a courtroom, but they have no business designing products. Too often, in their zealous pursuit of zero liability, they end up damaging products, alienating customers, destroying companies, and killing people. It's up to you to stop them.
  
  
• Good Grips: Ability before Branding
  Good Grips are those plush kitchen tools that make life so much easier. Originally conceived to help people with arthritis, they were developed to improve everyone's comfort in the kitchen. They were also designed to be marketed, but not with the heavy hand currently applied by those spouting the branding buzzword.
  
  
• How to Write a Report Without Getting Lynched
  You put forth your best effort to explain to the stupid sods exactly how and where they screwed up, then they have the temerity to not appreciate your fine efforts. Here's how to write a report that will cause change, instead of uproar.
  
  
• Is the Internet Really Collapsing?
  The sky is falling.� It has been falling for about a year now, and it feels like it won�t stop falling until every business associated with the Internet is dead, dead, dead.� What is happening now happens with every new explosion of technology. When the sky has finished falling, it will leave behind an industry with far fewer, but much healthier players. And then things will get better than they ever were.
  

• Replay TV
  You�ve all heard of TiVo. Sure you have. TiVo is the hard-disk video recorder that automatically records all of your favorite shows. Then there�s ReplayTV, the other leading brand.� Late last fall, ReplayTV crossed over a line that should never have been crossed, one that threatened the future of consumer products.
  
  
• Top 9 Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks
  The Dock, though actually ported from NeXT, is seen by many as a clumsy attempt to copy the Windows task bar, but to make it look "cooler," at the expense of usability. Here are the most obvious flaws in their result. (Updated in January, 2004)
  
  
• The Butterfly Ballot: Anatomy of a Disaster
  Palm Beach's voter ballot changed the course of United States history. This month's article, building on a short piece I wrote shortly after the November election, traces all the various mistakes and events that led to this latest human-machine interaction melt-down. Among the surprises? The same thing happened to the Republicans in Palm Beach four years ago. Among the lessons to be learned? The same thing could happen to you in your own company.
  
  
• Arm-Wrestling the Photoshop Police
  Adobe is shipping a 6.0 upgrade to Photoshop that, for many Mac users, proves unusable. We learned back in the 1980s that when you rake your legitimate users over the coals in the hopes of catching the occasional thief, you end up with a lot of really raked off users. Apparently, someone at Adobe has forgotten.

2000

• Apple's Latest Woes
• Urbanpixel's Visible Navigation
• Denial Elephants
• Mac UI Trends

• If They Don't Test...
• Cell phone Solution
• Apple Advantage Lost
• OS X First Look

1999

• Century of Scams
• Traffic Engineering
• Privacy and Security
• The Morphine Pump
  ���� Pump Reader Response
• Avoiding Frequent Flier Syndrome

• Making the Right Technology Decision
• How Programmers Stole the Web
• Cure for Restaurant Confusion
• When Interfaces Kill
• Maximum Security
• Quiz Designed to Give you Fitts

1998

• Travel & Lodging Site Guidelines
• The Promise of Computers
• Publish a Great User Manual
• Manufacturer Site Guidelines
• Sorry State of Web Design
• Website Navigation Bars
• 7 +/- 32768
• Polite Interfaces
• The Complexity Paradox
• Single-Use Application Design

• Scaling Information Access
• Separating the Men from their Toys
• Silo Design for Web Xactions
• Intuitive vs. Familiar
• Rough Sketches
• Designers as Architects
• How to buy a Designer
• Cross-Platform Realities
• Close-Coupled Testing
• Maximizing Windows

Additional Papers

• Magic & Software Design
  Published as "Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design," in the Proceedings of INTERCHI 1993
  
  
• Video Prototyping
  Published in the Proceedings of CHI 1994

• March, 2001
• February, 2001
• December, 2000
• July, 2000
• April, 2000
• February, 2000
• January, 2000
• December, 1999
• November, 1999
• November, 1999--The Pump

• September, 1999
• August, 1999
• July, 1999
• June, 1999
• May, 1999
• April, 1999
• February, 1999
• January, 1999
• December, 1998
• November, 1998