https://interfaces.institute/ The study of how humans and systems meet — the marks that must act, the patterns that must work, and the failures worth keeping. 6 of 9 levels open. https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-lag/https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-lag/Twelve of thirty patterns have no native primitive at all. The menu button got one in January 2025; the accordion in September 2024; the dialog in 2022, for a pattern that shipped in 1984. The switch, on every phone since 2007, still has none. https://interfaces.institute/collections/pattern-register/https://interfaces.institute/collections/pattern-register/Twenty-three of thirty specify keyboard interaction. The seven that do not are mostly static structures — a breadcrumb is a list of links, and needs no keys of its own. https://interfaces.institute/collections/keyboard-grammar/https://interfaces.institute/collections/keyboard-grammar/Arrow Down, Arrow Up and Enter are each bound by thirteen patterns; Home and End by eleven. Space and Enter do not activate the same things, which is where the confusion comes from — the specification itself is inconsistent. https://interfaces.institute/collections/wcag/https://interfaces.institute/collections/wcag/Nine criteria were added in 2.2, and they are overwhelmingly about touch: dragging movements, target size, and three about whether focus can be seen. A standard catching up with an input shift that happened in 2007. https://interfaces.institute/collections/accessibility-law/https://interfaces.institute/collections/accessibility-law/European accessibility law is not WCAG. WCAG is clause 9 of thirteen; there are more requirements for native software than for the web, and a whole chapter on reaching emergency services. Meanwhile US federal procurement is still bound to WCAG 2.0 — a 2008 standard, in 2026. https://interfaces.institute/collections/role-taxonomy/https://interfaces.institute/collections/role-taxonomy/Fifty-six concrete roles describe structure; twenty-three describe widgets. ARIA is a document ontology that happens to contain controls — not, as most designers meet it, a toolkit for making custom widgets accessible. Twelve roles are abstract and authors are forbidden to use them at all. https://interfaces.institute/collections/component-census/https://interfaces.institute/collections/component-census/Only two components appear in all eight: a button and a text field. Sizes diverge from 23 to 115. Eight of the most influential design systems do not agree on what a component is, or what to call it. https://interfaces.institute/collections/conventions/https://interfaces.institute/collections/conventions/Fifteen of twenty-four conventions are named by no standard at all — not in the Authoring Practices, not backed by a native primitive, not mentioned in WCAG. The logo that goes home, the gear that opens settings, the asterisk that means required: load-bearing folklore. https://interfaces.institute/collections/what-can-be-tested/https://interfaces.institute/collections/what-can-be-tested/Twenty-four of the eighty-seven criteria have an approved ACT rule. Forty-nine have no rule at all, approved or proposed. And the rules that do exist pile up where testing is mechanical: Name, Role, Value and Info and Relationships hold twenty-eight of the hundred rule-to-criterion links between… https://interfaces.institute/collections/accommodations/https://interfaces.institute/collections/accommodations/The platform learned to ask about the device thirteen months before it learned to ask about the person. Hover and pointer reached Baseline on 11 December 2018; prefers-reduced-motion on 15 January 2020. Vestibular disorders did not begin in 2020. And three accommodations are specified but still… https://interfaces.institute/collections/input-purposes/https://interfaces.institute/collections/input-purposes/WCAG did not write a taxonomy of what a form field can be about — it adopted the browser’s. Fifty-three of HTML’s fifty-four autofill field names are in the Input Purposes list, and the single exception is one-time-code: the only token that is about proving who you are rather than describing who… https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-keyboard/https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-keyboard/The platform names 284 keys. The ARIA Authoring Practices bind nineteen of them, plus four printable characters. Twelve of the eighteen families are bound by nothing at all — every one of the 72 media-controller keys, all 30 TV keys, all 30 IME and composition keys, the whole of audio, speech,… https://interfaces.institute/collections/aria-properties/https://interfaces.institute/collections/aria-properties/ARIA 1.2 defines forty-eight states and properties. Six of them are ever required by any role, and eighty-three of the ninety-four roles require nothing at all. Fifteen attributes are global and two of those are deprecated. Where the specification did spend its deprecations, it was to narrow four… https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-form/https://interfaces.institute/collections/the-form/A signup form asking for a first name, a last name and a postcode fails in three separate ways. CLDR gives every one of its 766 locales a second given name, and 447 of them a second family name. Seventy of the 252 territories have no postal code at all — not optional, absent — among them Hong Kong,… https://interfaces.institute/collections/line-breaking/https://interfaces.institute/collections/line-breaking/Every design system assumes a word is a run of letters between spaces. That describes one character in eight. Ideographic characters — which break almost anywhere — outnumber alphabetic ones 6.4 to 1, and an entire class cannot be broken at all without a dictionary. https://interfaces.institute/collections/status-codes/https://interfaces.institute/collections/status-codes/The protocol has twenty-eight ways to say you did something wrong and eleven to admit it did. Two and a half times more vocabulary for blaming the caller than for accepting fault. https://interfaces.institute/collections/grids/https://interfaces.institute/collections/grids/Sixteen of sixty-eight publish a grid you could rebuild from — columns, gutter, margin and a breakpoint. Nineteen document no grid at all, while documenting their components in detail. Forty name no breakpoint. Twelve columns is the answer most of those that state a count give, and three rows in… https://interfaces.institute/collections/design-tools/https://interfaces.institute/collections/design-tools/Thirty of the hundred and twenty answer with a verdict rather than a number, and a pass hides the threshold it applied — which matters because two checkers can disagree on the same pair of colours depending on which specification and which rounding they use. Thirteen do not say which specification… https://interfaces.institute/collections/referatory/https://interfaces.institute/collections/referatory/Thirty-two of forty-five say nothing whatsoever about the copyright of the screenshots they host — thousands of images of other people’s commercial interfaces, with no stated basis. Eleven publish no capture date, which makes them undated claims about how software looked on an unstated day.… https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#fittshttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#fittsThe time to acquire a target is a function of its distance and its size. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#hickhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#hickChoice time grows with the logarithm of the number of equally likely options. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#millerhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#millerImmediate memory holds about seven chunks — said Miller, about a specific laboratory task, once. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#jakobhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#jakobPeople spend most of their time on other sites: they arrive carrying expectations your interface didn't set. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#statehttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#stateThe interface must keep the human's model and the machine's state in agreement, continuously and legibly. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#feedbackhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#feedback0.1s feels instantaneous; 1s keeps the flow of thought; 10s is the limit of attention — after that, people leave. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#affordancehttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#affordanceThe perceivable properties of a thing should announce what can be done with it. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#constrainthttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#constraintThe strongest instruction is the impossible action: design so the wrong thing cannot be done. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#recognitionhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#recognitionShow people their options; don't make them remember the incantation. https://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#teslerhttps://interfaces.institute/stairwell/#teslerEvery task has an irreducible complexity; the only question is who absorbs it — the system or the person. https://interfaces.institute/patterns/modal/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/modal/A modal is an interruption with a door policy: it seizes focus, dims the world behind it, and refuses to let anything continue until its one question is resolved. That seizure is the entire design — and the entire risk. Used precisely, it is the interface saying this cannot wait. Used habitually,… https://interfaces.institute/patterns/undo/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/undo/Two ways to protect a person from their own click. Confirm interrupts before the act: are you sure? — asked so often that the honest answer becomes a reflex, and the reflex defeats the protection. Undo permits the act and holds the door open after it: done — undo? One pattern taxes every action to… https://interfaces.institute/patterns/skeleton/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/skeleton/A skeleton screen shows the shape of content before the content — grey bars where text will land, a grey disc where the avatar will be. It replaces the spinner's honest message (the machine is busy) with a structural promise (here is what's coming). The wait is identical; the experience of it is… https://interfaces.institute/patterns/carousel/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/carousel/The carousel is what a homepage does instead of making a decision. Five stakeholders, five banners, one rotating frame — the conflict resolved by hiding four of the five messages at any moment and animating the evidence. The pattern's popularity is entirely internal: it solves a meeting, not a user… https://interfaces.institute/patterns/wizard/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/wizard/A wizard is one task wearing several screens. It buys a smaller decision at each moment and pays for it in page loads, and whether that trade is mercy or obstruction depends almost entirely on who is on the other side. For someone doing this once — registering a company, claiming a benefit, opening… https://interfaces.institute/patterns/empty-states/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/empty-states/Every list is empty before it is full, and the empty version is the first thing a new user sees. It is also, almost always, the last screen anyone designs — which is how so many products introduce themselves with a blank rectangle. https://interfaces.institute/patterns/infinite-scroll/https://interfaces.institute/patterns/infinite-scroll/Infinite scroll removes the page, and the page was carrying more than it looked. A page is a position: it can be linked, bookmarked, returned to, counted, and left. Remove it and browsing becomes cheaper by exactly one click per screenful, while finding, returning and comparing all become harder by… https://interfaces.institute/basement/norman/https://interfaces.institute/basement/norman/Affordances are the interface's honest signage: the shape of the thing should announce its use. When users fail predictably, redesign the handle, not the user. https://interfaces.institute/basement/dark/https://interfaces.institute/basement/dark/Every deceptive pattern is a legitimate principle inverted — friction, defaults, framing, urgency. The building's knowledge is dual-use; this room is where the Institute says so plainly. https://interfaces.institute/basement/hawaii/https://interfaces.institute/basement/hawaii/Consequence must be legible in the interface's very geometry: the catastrophic action cannot live one row away from the routine one, dressed identically. Confirmation is not ceremony-proportional by default — the designer must make it so. And for the truly irreversible, the absence of undo is… https://interfaces.institute/basement/mode/https://interfaces.institute/basement/mode/Modes are sometimes necessary; invisible modes never are. Every mode needs a persistent, glanceable announcement — and the more consequential the divergence, the louder the state must dress. The best fix is fewer modes; the honest fallback is modes that cannot be missed. https://interfaces.institute/basement/cookie-banner/https://interfaces.institute/basement/cookie-banner/A choice is only a choice when both answers cost the same. Where a law requires consent but says nothing about the geometry of the asking, the interface will make refusal expensive and call it compliance — and the regulator will eventually arrive to measure clicks. Design the two paths… https://interfaces.institute/basement/accidental-commerce/https://interfaces.institute/basement/accidental-commerce/Removing a step from a purchase removes it from a mistake as well; the two are the same step. Friction taken out of acquisition has to be matched by friction taken out of reversal, and it almost never is. Where the interface can complete an irreversible act faster than a person can notice it, the… https://interfaces.institute/whole-systems/bank-navigation/https://interfaces.institute/whole-systems/bank-navigation/One bank operates six top-level categories in each market. Four are the same. The two it chooses freely are not, and the choice is the whole finding. https://interfaces.institute/whole-systems/mtr-station-colour/https://interfaces.institute/whole-systems/mtr-station-colour/The Hong Kong MTR gives most of its stations a mosaic wall in its own colour, so that a passenger who cannot read the signage still knows where they are. Counted across the network the promise looks broken: ninety-eight stations share forty-one colour names, and “orange” does duty ten times. But… https://interfaces.institute/primitives/#seven-stateshttps://interfaces.institute/primitives/#seven-statesThe seven states every element has, each against the primitive that expresses it and dated by Baseline.