Act on press This is a UI design hill I will die on, and it dismays me how often and hard I have had to fight for it. Almost all interaction methods have a “press” and “release” event associated with them. Whenever possible, you should “do the thing” when you get the press event instead of waiting for the release event, because it makes the interaction feel substantially more responsive, and it reduces user errors by not allowing the focus to slide out of the hot box between press and release. Even a “ballistic tap”, where your finger is intentionally bouncing off the button or touch surface, involves several tens of milliseconds delay between the press and release, and most button presses have well over a hundred ms dwell time. There is a delight in interfaces that feel like they respond instantly to your wishes, and the benefit to every single user is often more important than additional niche features. Game developers, with simple UI toolkits, tend to get this right more often, but “sophisticated” app designers will often fight hard against it because it is mostly incompatible with options like interactive touch scrolling views, long press menus, and drag and drop. Being able to drag scroll a web page or view with interactive controls in it is here to stay, and nets out way better than having to use a separate scroll bar, but there are still tons of fixed position controls that should act on press, and it is good UI design to favor them when possible. In the early days of mobile VR, the system keyboard was a dedicated little OpenGL app that responded instantly. With full internationalization it became prudent to turn it into a conventional Android app, but the default act-on-release button behavior made it feel noticeably crappier. The design team resisted a push to change it, and insisted on commissioning a user study, which is a corporate politics ploy to bury something. I was irritated at how they tried to use leading questions and tasks, but It still came back one of the clearest slam-dunks I have seen for user testing – objectively less typos, expressed preference, and interview comments about the act-on-press version feeling “crisper” and “more responsive”. So, I won that one, but the remaining times I brought it up for other interfaces, I did not, and you still see act-on-release throughout the Meta VR system interfaces.

Here are the slides I presented this week on speculative loading (prefetch and prerender): docs.google.com/presentation… They include performance data on how beneficial these features are, from some partners and from Chrome's own in-the-wild metrics!

requestIdleCallback to be in the next Safari Technology Preview webkit.org/b/259996 🎉 Hopefully shipping with Safari 17.0/17.1 in September/October. (It shipped 8 and 6 years ago in Chromium and Firefox.)

Please remind me how we are moving forward. In this video, a machine from the year ~2000 (600MHz, 128MB RAM, spinning-rust hard disk) running Windows NT 3.51. Note how incredibly snappy opening apps is. 👇

Using CSS :has with :nth-last-child to count child elements can do magic 🤩 This is an example of a timeline layout that changes based on the number of items. Article: ishadeed.com/article/conditi…

iOS 17 includes a much simpler alternative interface marketed for the intellectually disabled. Obvious affordances, zero clutter, and huge UI elements. apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/a…

instant.page 5.2 is out 💫 – 5.2 notably “fixes” (disables) preloading not being used on Shopify sites in Chromium < 110. – It improves preloading speed by using fetchpriority. – The source code is now fully annotated. Full changelog: instant.page/changelog

Happy to get this side project out… a mix of old/new tech, design, research, and limitations. Modern Font Stacks - System font stacks organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts are the ones right there on your machine. modernfontstacks.com/

WebKit’s transition to GitHub is not without its problems: GitHub now uses requestIdleCallback — a web API from 2017 — and that doesn’t work on WebKit. bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi…

Put “Note for Safari users: Install to your home screen to stay logged in. Here’s how.” on your login form so that you can send them notifications (and so they don’t get logged out every week). 🧠

Visiting a site that uses JS from Google’s CDN looks very painful in China (1 billion internet users). 😬 “It takes 2+ minutes to incompletely load a page. I made a video to show you what it's like: player.vimeo.com/video/76216…” Source: meta.stackexchange.com/a/383…

5 takeaways from screen reader usability interviews 🔗 jessbudd.com/blog/screen-rea… — "Testing your product for accessibility yourself will never compare with testing with real users. Test with automated tools, test manually yourself, then test with people with disabilities." #a11y

Exceptionally good CSS demo: dynamic holographic Pokémon cards deck-24abcd.netlify.app/

Safari dev advocate asking for opinions on prefetch (instant.page’s web API) → good sign. May they join the ranks of Firefox 2 from 2006 and Chrome 8 from 2010 soon. 🙏🏼

Cloudflare’s reverse proxy coming to our own servers. 🥹

Years ago when I was working on the first iPhone keyboard, I originally had the popped key fade slowly after you released the key. As I kept looking at it, I continued to make the animation shorter and shorter… until I reduced it to zero. Better that way. Less distracting.

When I design user interfaces for common activities, I think about what it will be like to live with the thing 150 times a day.