A command bar would allow us to remove the entry points to a lot of features: instead of a button leading you to X, we could allow you to search for X. That way, any user could quickly find what they cared about, but the UI would never be cluttered or overwhelming. Basically this was a way to scale a UI but keep it discoverable. It also had the une... See more

Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.

All information tools have to give users some wa... See more

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we ... See more

Fast forward to today and tools are incentivized to expand their market by attempting to solve everything at once. But this means that the market for any given piece of software is often anyone and everyone.