Fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head. Interaction designer Josh Clark explains what you need to keep in mind when designing for mobile touchscreens and compares finger-friendly touch interfaces for iPhone, iPad and Android

Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons.

Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

Chosen is a JavaScript plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in both jQuery and Prototype flavors.

Kivy is an open source software library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps.

Screenshots from various applications running on Symbolics Lisp Machines.

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

This document is intended to help a non-programmer to use traits and traitsUI to write an interactive graphical application. The reader is assumed to have some basic python scripting knowledge (see ref [1] for a basic introduction). Knowledge of numpy/scipy [2] helps understanding the data processing aspects of the examples, but may not be paramount. Some examples rely on matplotlib [3] . This document is not a replacement for user manuals and references of the different packages (traitsUI [4], scipy, matplotlib). It provides a “cookbook” approach, and not a reference.

a recent product developed by Senseg and Toshiba Information Systems called "E-Sense" that successfully embeds an electrotactile display into a touchpad, LCD, or other curved surface (eg. all over a cellphone), thereby providing programmable high-resolution texture feedback to a user

ultrasound hand tracking

"CSS buttons that are sexy looking, really flexible, but with the most minimalistic markup as possible."

qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative framework for creating rich internet applications (RIAs). Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build impressive cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed.

It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

"When I saw Google drawings on a Twitter update a few weeks ago, I didn't really think about it until I got a feeling I might not have understood a rather complex problem at work. I drew a diagram and asked my colleague to edit it in case I had misunderstood him. It worked out well, we're still using the drawing as a basis for discussion, and it is constantly being refined as we go along. So taking the next step and trying out a wireframe was an obvious decision."

110 slides by Arnout de Vries

Microsoft's recommendation for touch interaction in Windows 7

"Inkface is SVG based GUI framework. You design the GUI in an SVG image editor (like Inkscape/Illustrator) and use inkface framework to wire your program logic with the elements of your SVG GUI. The benefits of this approach:
Rich GUIs of any colors and any shapes.
Replacing the GUI is as trivial as replacing the old SVG file with new one.
Designing new GUIs/themes is extremely easy given that it involves modifying the SVG file in a full-fledged Image editor. Unlike other theme making scenarios, there is no need to create tons of .png files and storing them in standard directory structure."

Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source.

Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows using Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface.

Articles on iPad design

We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

A bubble is a fully editable and interactive view of a fragment such as a method or collection of member variables. Bubbles, in contrast to windows, have minimal border decoration, avoid clipping their contents by using automatic code reflow and elision, and do not overlap but instead push each other out of the way. Bubbles exist in a large, pannable 2-D virtual space where a cluster of bubbles comprises a concurrently visible working set. Bubbles support a lightweight grouping mechanism, and further support connections between them.

PyMT is an open source library for developing multi-touch applications. It is completely cross platform (Linux/OSX/Win) and released under the terms of the GNU LGPL.

It comes with native support for many multi-touch input devices, a growing library of multi-touch aware widgets, hardware accelerated OpenGL drawing, and an architecture that is designed to let you focus on building custom and highly interactive applications as quickly and easily as possible.

Since PyMT is a pure Python library, you can take advantage of its highly dynamic nature and use any of the thousands of high quality and open source python libraries out there.

"Awesomium is a library that makes it easy for developers to embed the web in their applications.
For example, it can be used for:
Powering an in-game GUI using HTML/JS/CSS
Rendering a live web-page to a 3D object and interacting with it
A framework for an advanced, 3D web-browser
An offscreen renderer for snapshots or recordings of web-pages
The implementation of in-game advertisting."

Collaborative editors have to combine input coming from the local user and from remote users. One of the significant user interface challenges is cursor behaviour. When a remote user's change is merged into the document, what happens to the local user's cursor? Likewise, what happens to a selection which the local user has made?

News and research on touch interface usability

This website is all about making research accessible. We deal mainly with the human-centered aspects of IT product development: Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design, Human Factors, Usability, Information Architecture, and related fields.
We make research accessible through our 4 sections:
a free, open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia interlinked with our bibliography
a comprehensive, editable (but peer-reviewed) bibliography which includes the most authoritative publications in the above-mentioned disciplines
a conference calendar, which is used on several other websites through our ICAL interface.
"misDesigns" - a new rhetorical vehicle, which ties research themes to short, simple, and funny examples of defective designs.
We believe in Open Content and use the Creative Commons Copyright Licences, which makes the content of this website in effect the property of our community, not of this specific website.

Welcome to 3dui.org. This site is intended as a gathering place for all those interested in the design, evaluation, and application of 3D user interfaces.

How we draw depends on the tools we have: drawing with a pencil is very different from drawing with a brush. The TwelvePixels project attempts to create a new type of digital "brush", a set of techniques and algorithms that allow us to draw with very simple input devices, such as the twelve keys of the mobile phone.

Creating such a "brush" leads to a whole new range of creative applications that can be enjoyed anywhere casually without having to use a PC. Examples include, but are not limited to, annotating digital photographs taken on a mobile phone, creating personalized emoticons for text communication, drawing characters for mobile games, and sharing all this new content with millions of other people.

Lecture "User Interfaces" by Patrick Baudisch (wInter term 08/09)

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97'"

roughly drawn widgets for paper prototyping

pywinauto is a set of python modules to automate the Microsoft Windows GUI. At it's simplest it allows you to send mouse and keyboard actions to windows dialogs and controls

JUCE (Jules' Utility Class Extensions) is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications.
It's particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound.

UI design for movie playbacks

Short Overview...

KDE4 HIG

Globe4D is an interactive, four-dimensional globe. It’s a projection of the Earth’s surface on a physical sphere. It shows the historical movement of the continents as its main feature, but it is also capable of displaying all kinds of other geographi

The XWand is a novel wireless sensor package that enables styles of natural interaction with intelligent environments. For example, a user may point the wand at a device and control it using simple gestures. The XWand system leverages the intelligence of

"One problem is that the iPhone doesn’t support the concept of selected text. "

"The darker side of Human-Computer Interaction". Workshops on mis-/abuse of user interfaces

“Why can’t products be simpler?” cries the reviewer in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the local newspaper. “We want simplicity” cry the people befuddled by all the features of their latest whatever. Do they really mean it? No.

This is the homepage of people interested in pattern languages in human-computer interaction (HCI) and user interface design and the IFIP TC13 HCI Patterns Task Group.

An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design

UI news