Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc... and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year ...

As a Designer, I sometimes need to evaluate different technologies and platforms from a Designer's perspective. Why is it important to get a Designer's view? As Designers we can quickly be boxed in with inflexible UI layers, unusable sets of standard patterns, and the inability to create a great experience. ...

If you're an Interaction Designer, I'm sure you've noticed a new design pattern in the past year - one that doesn't really seem to have a proper name yet. In fact, you're probably already incorporating this pattern into your designs. It seems like almost every major redesign is leveraging ...

Yesterday I got to hear John Maeda speak at Sabre as part of the Wundermind series of speakers. I've read John's book (The Laws of Simplicity), and really enjoyed it. He gave a great presentation - it's rare to hear someone who really gets both technology and design (and he's ...

Awhile back I posted my "Universe of User Experience", where I wanted to show all the pieces that needed to come together to create a great experience. This was very helpful in educating people on what User Experience was and why all the pieces were necessary. But this did not ...

SXSWi has come and gone again, this was my fourth time to attend and it just keeps getting bigger every year. When I first visited in 2003 (or was it 2002?) Bruce Sterling was still throwing SXSWi parties at his home and FROG Design hosted everyone in their office, ...

Recently a developer was going over the browser baselines for a project, they listed them as: IE 6.0, Mozilla 1.5, Netscape 8.0, Opera 9.02 and Safari 1.2. I saw this and thought WAH? Mozilla and Netscape? No IE 7? Safari 1.2? Opera? Let's take a look and see what should ...

In web design there are a couple things that are for the most part consistent across sites to provide a more uniform experience. Things like most logos tend to be on the top left of a page (as well as link to the homepage) and the search goes somewhere ...

Over the past couple of months I've seen some new user interface ideas on some popular websites. Some were improvements, others a bit awkward to use. I've collected screenshots of these new UI elements and talked a bit about each of them below.