Interactivity

A fantastic voyage, the illusion of good taste, the art of subtraction

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“The invisible walls for designers have been broken down. Maybe we don’t know it yet, but this year is the perfect time to start reframing the influence and vision of product design within and beyond companies.”Product design in 2026: the beginning of a fantastic voyage? →By Kike PeñaNew playbook on modern research: Building Influence through Participation →[Sponsored] Researcher Mahad Bullo rebuilt his research model to produce 4x the

Accessibility Testing Essentials: Get the Real, Valuable Picture by Testing in Context

In this lesson, you'll discover why accessibility testing is essential for validating your design work and how it differs from both usability testing and code-level QA. You'll examine the critical importance of testing with users' own devices and configurations in their natural environments, rather than relying on sterile lab setups.In this video, Frank Spillers, Service Designer and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, shares practical lessons from real testing sessions. You'll learn the cha

The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams

Through many discussions with industry colleagues, we’ve started hearing a phrase more often when swapping stories about AI adoption:“Now I don’t have to bug [someone].”Product designers don’t need to bug researchers anymore — retrieval-augment generation (RAG) tools surface insights instantly. Product Managers don’t need to bug designers for mockups — AI generates acceptable options. Engineers don’t need to bug accessibility teams — automated scanners flag issues in real-time.It’s framed as lib

Break Biases and Design Beyond What You Can See

Designers and developers automatically bring visual assumptions to their work, such as prioritizing map displays over search results. Alternative approaches are essential for users who don't interact visually with these services.In this interview, Frank Spillers speaks with a blind user about the accessibility challenges of Google Maps and location-based services. They discuss how visual bias in design affects navigation apps, exploring the differences between driving directions (which work well

The right touch: mapping AI presence to user intent

Knowing what a user wants is only half the problem. The other half is knowing how, and how much, to respond.This is the third piece in a small series on product design in AI-driven systems. The first article explored how our role as designers is evolving, and the second looked at how signals tied to user intent shape AI-powered experiences. This one builds on that foundation, moving from understanding intent to deciding how a system should show up in response to it.If you haven’t read them, no w

Pixels of the Week – April 26, 2026

This edition debunks 9 accessibility myths with data, and discuses the accessibility engineering problem. Plus: a Zelda Three.js browser game, a subway train jazz experiment, and making emojis screen reader accessible.

Show HN: Aperture Core – a human attention control plane for agent systems

I just released the first public version of Aperture Core, an SDK for deciding which agent events deserve human attention now, which should wait, and which should stay in the background.The core loop is simple: - publish an event - get back a frame if it should enter the human attention surface - render that frame in your UI/workflow - submit the human response back into the engineAs agents get more capable and one human starts supervising more of them, the bottleneck shifts toward human at

Show HN: Synesthetic Computation

"When perception shifts, and the feeling of control takes over")I wrote up a deep dive into a security issue in OpenClaw that escalates from a seemingly small UX/trust boundary problem into full remote code execution via a single malicious link.The article walks through the full exploit chain from a systems perspective rather than just a CVE summary. The key theme is what I call “synesthetic computation”: when subjective context, UI state, agent memory, and system permissions get

Show HN: RotaFlow – A privacy-first shift calendar built with SwiftUI

I built RotaFlow to solve the UX disaster of current shift work apps. Most incumbents are web-wrappers laden with ads.The Stack:* Language: Swift 6 / SwiftUI. * Persistence: Core Data synced via CloudKit (NSPersistentCloudKitContainer). * Architecture: MVVM with a custom "LoopEngine" for O(1) shift calculation.The Interesting Part: I implemented a "Future Cliff" paywall. The app is fully functional for the next 30 days. Accessing dates beyond t+30d triggers a blurred UI

The rulebook for designing AI experiences

Three of the world’s largest tech companies have published guidelines for responsible Human-AI Interaction. Here’s what they got right, and where the gaps are.Ask ten people in the industry what responsible AI design means and you will get ten different answers. Ethics frameworks, trustworthy AI principles, responsible innovation checklists: the vocabulary keeps growing. But underneath all of that sits a more practical question. When someone is actually sitting in front of an AI-powered product,

The Nervous Voice in Your Head? It’s Costing You Promotions

You're in the review meeting and the team lead just asked a question about the project you've been refining for weeks. You know the answer. But when you open your mouth, nothing comes out. Meanwhile, your mind is saying: Wait, double-check, make sure, don't risk it. Then, someone else jumps in and answers for you. By the time you have your response, everyone’s moved on and you’re kicking yourself at another missed opportunity.You might have more experience than your colleagues, work longer hours

Design for Everyone: Understand Vision, Hearing, Cognition, and Motor Skills

In this video, Frank Spillers, Service Designer and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, walks you through how color contrast, captions, cognitive differences, and motor limitations can change the way people use websites and apps, and explains why creating disability personas and testing across a range of needs helps you build more inclusive experiences.Note that the video refers to Asperger syndrome. While this used to be an officially recognized condition, it has now been folded into Autism

Triple Your Impact: Better Accessibility Means Better Usability and SEO

In this video, Frank Spillers, Service Designer and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how making content screen-reader friendly through clearer structure and meaningful text, like headings, alt text, captions, and transcripts, can reduce “junk” for users while also strengthening SEO signals.[[video:688]]Modern Screen Reader NavigationWhile the core principle of reducing unnecessary verbosity remains essential, it's important to note that modern screen readers offer sophisticated n

Designing with AI without losing your mind

With critical thinking skills on the line I built a real-time AI collaborator, Thia — with vision and voice capabilities to keep early ideas raw, the loop tight, and the thinking mine.Sketching on a whiteboard with an AI collaborator — image generated by AIYou don’t typically notice changes in your own behaviour until they become more pronounced. I recently found myself reaching all too quickly for LLMs to prompt on design problems I would have previously spent time digesting and sketching out s

Micro-interactions still matter

It's the little UI/UX touches that make your app feel alive. Let's look at 4 simple lines of CSS that can transform a boring interaction ...

Increase Website Engagement with Micro Interactions

This CXL Feed explores the use of micro-interactions on websites and landing pages, inspired by Apple's iPhone 16 launch page.

Good designers, bad websites: a proposal

I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, “I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text”, “Not my fault if somebody can’t use this device”, or “Who cares if this i

Why Research also needs to research itself

We have been living in a paradox that is no longer new. Never have we had so much access to information and, at the same time, never have we been so exposed to misinformation. Biased reports, dashboards that impress them more by volume than by clarity, statistics without context or source. All this forces us to revisit a fundamental question: how can we trust the data we use to make decisions?Photo by Luke Chesser on UnsplashThis concern led me to revisit concepts of Metadesign, especially throu

How AI may reshape elderly care

A unique design challengePhoto by Georg Arthur Pflueger on UnsplashAI has changed so many parts of our lives, for better and for worse. Beyond the uses we see every day, it’s also quietly serving groups that don’t always get much attention.There are over 1 billion people aged 60 and older, and over 55 million people living with dementia worldwide. My own family and many people around me have had to take care of an elderly loved one. It’s never easy. It takes constant attention, patience, time, a

Building a b2b customer journey map

AI synthesis fails incredibly plausibly. Structured findings, clear themes, confident language and somewhere in there, an insight with no evidence behind it. I've been stress-testing this for a month and the gap between "looks right" and "is right" is where researcher credibility goes to die. I'm joining Tom Barragry from Survicate on May 6th to get into exactly this, where AI genuinely holds up in research workflows, where it'll quietly get you burned, and what human-in-the-loop actually looks