i
Interaction intelligence

The Interfaces Institute

how humans and systems meet

A building with a basement of documented failures, a stairwell of principles, and floors for primitives, components, patterns, flows and whole systems. 6 of its 9 levels are open — 30 rooms built, from ten collections reproduced whole out of published standards to four failures traced to the principle each one broke.

Open the collections How this is built

The building

the lift is a zoom

Failures at the bottom, the frontier at the top, and the same object readable at every floor. Most of it is not open yet, and says so rather than pretending.

R
Observatory Emerging modalities, read without breathlessness.
3 rooms
  • Agentic
  • Spatial
  • Voice
not open yet
5
Whole systems One object, named trade-off, read at five grains.
9 rooms
Open →
4
Flows Journeys, judged by their worst step.
4 rooms
  • Checkout
  • Recovery
  • Cancellation
  • Onboarding
not open yet
3
Patterns The grammar book. Every entry carries an avoid-when.
12 rooms
Open →
2
Components The specimen cabinet. The button has a biography.
6 rooms
  • Button
  • Text field
  • Checkbox
  • Toggle
  • Select
  • Date picker
not open yet
1
Primitives Inputs, outputs, latency, and the seven states.
5 rooms
Open →
G
Collections Bodies of evidence, reproduced whole from published sources.
10 rooms
Open →
S
The Stairwell Ten principles, each shipped with its own misuse.
10 rooms
Open →
B
The Basement Failures, documented and loved rather than hidden.
6 rooms
Open →
Section through the institute. Slab width is the number of rooms on that floor — hover a cell to name one room, click a filled one to open it, or expand a floor to read them all.

What the data says

§

Three findings from the ground floor, each one a join between sources that were never meant to be read together.

derived · two datasets joined

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.

30 patterns → reproduced

The 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.

30 patterns → derived

The 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.

27 keys →