Articles by Austin Henderson

Austin Henderson’s 45-year career in Human-Computer Interaction includes user interface research and architecture at Xerox, Apple, and Pitney Bowes, and strategic design with Fitch, Rivendel, and Scalable Conversations. Henderson seeks to enable designers and users to better evolve tools to respond to needs in a rich and changing world.

Usability of Interactive Systems: It Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better

One would think that by now that software applications, online services, and electronic appliances that are poorly designed and difficult to learn and operate would be a thing of the past. After thirty years of CHI conferences, twenty years of UPA conferences, and countless books, articles, and websites about usability and interaction design, shouldn’t all […] [Read More]

Curating Evolution

Introduction Consider the meanings of words. Since language was invented hundreds of millennia ago, the meanings of words have continuously evolved. Importantly, this collective evolution has been achieved, not through premeditated coordination, but rather through exploration and convergence in use. It is a buzzing, booming cauldron of meanings, yielding effective, drifting, locally-coherent yet globally disparate […] [Read More]