iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.

“Indeed, there’s a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools’ usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.

Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is tons of room for improvement. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are stunning, but their front-ends have lagged.

By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there’s very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes”

I’ve been tagged a number of times on Twitter from people are asking me to weigh in on the following comic by beloved Parisian comic artist Boulet. See the original tweet here. Since folks are asking (and it warms my robotic heart that you do), here’s my take on this issue. Boulet, this is for…

The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.

Menu and sub-menu mouse movement, and user expectations.