Designing interfaces and documents
13 articles
- AI-generated user interfaces Defects and quality of interfaces built by AI models and agents (accessibility failures, generic design, evaluation benchmarks), and how they compare with human-built UIs.
- Cognitive systems engineering The design-oriented field that treats people and technology as joint cognitive systems: its concepts, its account of automation failures, and the thin evidence for its methods.
- Cognitive task analysis Methods that elicit and represent the cues, judgments and strategies experts use in complex work, and the dispute over how reliable they are and how much they improve training.
- Decision support Helping one person decide better: decision aids, debiasing, advice taking and AI assistance, and the dispute over whether any of it beats deciding alone.
- Design systems What a design language or design system contains, how its parts are derived, built, documented and reviewed, and the thin evidence on whether it speeds work or improves consistency.
- Evidence-based interface design Which layout, typography, contrast, form, loading-state and accessibility choices measurably change task success, speed, errors and comprehension, and which popular rules the studies do not support.
- Inclusive design Adapting to individual users' needs and preferences, and the curb-cut claim that features built for some users help everyone, which holds for captions and fails or is untested elsewhere.
- Interface design process Which steps of designing an interface (briefs with users and scenarios, alternatives before building, specified states, review, AI agents in the loop) have measured effects, and how thin that evidence is.
- Usability evaluation How interfaces are checked for usability, by testing with users or by inspection, and the disputes over how many users are enough, how much evaluators agree, and whether language-model agents can stand in for either.
- Visual presentations Turning text or data into a short sequence of slides or panels: what segmenting, sentence headlines, design polish, diagrams and generated slides do for understanding and memory, and where preference and learning diverge.
- Visual representation of information Charts, diagrams and tables as ways of showing information: how people decode them, when pictures help learning over text alone, and the disputes over encoding rankings, embellishment and pie charts.
- Visual storytelling Sequences of panels that introduce a dense document without a speaker, the range of representation forms, and the thin evidence on whether visual narrative beats prose.
- Writing for comprehension What experiments show about plain language, readability formulas, sentence structure, headings, lists, hedging and numbers, and why most rules work only for some readers and some tasks.