Spreadsheets are particularly useful for thinking through financial models, budgets, or any situation that involves considering lots of possible scenarios. Instead of laboriously redoing a bunch of math, you can quickly ask “what if?” questions and see the effects.

Very nice work by Litt and the Ink and Switch crew. Wondering if there’s a way to combine Ambsheets v1 and v2 to have both a nice interactive grid and clear formulas when you need them.

80% of the people only need 20% of the features.

Users often struggle with cloud file-sharing applications. Problems appear to arise not only from interface flaws, but also from misunderstanding the underlying semantics of operations like linking, attaching, downloading, and editing. We argue that these difficulties echo long-standing challenges in understanding concepts in programming languages like aliasing, copying, and mutation.

via: https://blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/25/cloud-sharing.html

As HCI is applied in increasingly diverse contexts, it is im- portant to consider situations in which computational or in- formation technologies may be less appropriate. This pa- per presents a series of questions that can help researchers, designers, and practitioners articulate a technology’s appro- priateness or inappropriateness. Use of these questions is demonstrated via examples from the literature. The paper concludes with specific arguments for improving the conduct of HCI. This paper provides a means for understanding and articulating the limits of HCI technologies, an important but heretofore under-explored contribution to the field.

An essay exploring Apple’s historical decisions and more broadly the act of designing for buyers versus users.