interfacing

Thirty-six labs. Thirty deviations. Seventy-seven concordance entries. One argument. You don't understand a guideline until you've broken it on purpose and watched what fell out.

I. What this is

An interface phenomena laboratory — which is a long way of saying you get to break the rules and see the bruise. Not a textbook, not a research report, not the thing that will get you certified. Interfacing will not teach you the rules. It lets you violate them, in real time, with a knob, and it measures what happens to you while you do.

Interface guidelines aren't rules. They're compressed research. Someone spent years measuring what happens when targets get too small, when options multiply, when color carries all the meaning. The guideline is the compression. This app is the decompression.

II. The labs

Pick one from the sidebar. Each lab is one principle, knobs to break it, a reading to take, and a candid note about how this app uses it against you. The web edition ports all thirty-six.

III. The deviations wing

The other half of the book — thirty principled rule-breaks the renato.design suite commits on purpose, with the rule, the reason for the rule, the reason we broke it, and the cases where you should not copy us. Open the wing.

IV. Reading room

The Concordance holds the citations. The Help holds the knobs. The About page holds the argument.

V. Native vs. web

The native macOS app has FidgetUI, the GhostPerformer walkthrough, Nerd Mode, the full Concordance, and a Konami code that does something we won't spoil. This page is its reading room — enough to argue with, not enough to replace it.