Philip Haine’s articles on Product Vision, Innovation and Design

Product Design

Everything related to the design of interactive products.

Using gestures and voice for access to key tasks on a mobile device

How might the iPhone afford direct access to key apps and tasks without defiling its exterior with another dastardly button?

Apple makes the trackpad a mouse button

All kinds of potential goodness snuck in when Apple made the touchpad clickable.

A vision for a future laptop

How might the laptop form factor evolve?

4 Ways to Improve Saving Documents

Even UI designs as old as the Save dialog and the window titlebars have room for improvement.

Idea (partially) stolen: Tilt-to-Scroll

Tilt an iPhone to scroll

Thumbnail for this article

1995 Palm calendar creams the 2008 iPhone’s

The iPhone has a few things to learn from its grandpa.

Thumbnail for this article

The Design Pyramid

A unifying model of design.

Audio UI for Audio Players

Users of music players have their eyes busy and their ears free. Why not use the ears to augment the UI?

Thumbnail for this article

Thumbs up/thumbs down button for music players

Life is too short to listen to music you don’t like.

Thumbnail for this article

10 UI Wishes for 2008

Basic UI deficiencies in common products we’ve suffered for for years or decades.

Thumbnail for this article

Needs Analysis of Reusable Shopping Bags (plus a holiday gift idea)

MyOwnBags demonstrate a nice clean differentiation. Plus, they make a great gift for stylish people!

Thumbnail for this article

The Potential of Chumby

The Chumby does nothing specific, a lot in general.

Thumbnail for this article

Streamlining the BART QuickPlanner interface

A couple of tweaks to the BART schedule planner would make it much more useful.

Reading lists for Web Browsers

It should be easier to store pages to read later.

Thumbnail for this article

Making Backlit Keyboards More Useful

Can we tweak a gratuitous feature to make it a little bit more functional?

Thumbnail for this article

Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone

Sacrificing simplicity for the appearance of simplicity.

Thumbnail for this article

UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row

Reducing the needless UI overhead in Front Row.

Panning & scrolling with a mouse by tilting

Tilt the mouse to pan and scroll

Thumbnail for this article

User Interface Friction

UI friction needlessly wastes the user’s energy on delays and busywork.

Separate slurs from the content in message boards

If you can’t beat down flame wars, how about formalizing them?