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

Designs to Steal

Ideas for specific designs. See also: Quick Ideas for quick & dirty ideas.

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.

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?

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Thumbs up/thumbs down button for music players

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

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10 UI Wishes for 2008

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

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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.

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Making Backlit Keyboards More Useful

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

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Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone

Sacrificing simplicity for the appearance of simplicity.

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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

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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?

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Redesigning the Buffet Line

Applying design lessons between the analog and digital worlds

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Captain Kirk’s Computer

Add speech and Wikipedia is it.

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Web interface to cellphone configuration

Why are we still laboriously entering phone numbers into our cellphones’ chintzy UIs?

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Making efficient use of big displays

GUI standards, apps and web pages have not kept up with ballooning displays

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Automatically Exchanging Encryption Keys

Let’s let email clients deal with the hassle of exchanging public keys.