Close to the Business
The best software designers and developers are the ones who completely understand the business and flows for which they are creating product. This understanding allows them to apply their technical skills to business problems and create great product. And the best way to understand is to be a part of the business, to be close to it. Drawing on my career to date, the best products I have made have all come from me being right in the thick of things.
On Designing Web Applications balancing Identity, Usability and Familiarity
Graphic design without understanding the user, the flow and site interaction leads to pretty, uniquely identifiable web applications that are quite unusable and fail to connect with their users. Web applications that mimic the graphic design of others may seem to be more useable, because they are so familiar, but look like someone else’s product, have no identity, seem bland and boring, and also fail to connect with their users.
Somewhere there has to be a balance between familiarity, identity and usability, in a design that engages users. Here is how we found it.
VC tries to sell a con
In Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining, Michael Arrington uses the 1994 post by overworked engineer Jamie Zawinski to make his point that startups are hard, Silicon Valley is awesome, you must work long hours, and if you do, the rewards are worth it. He states But you also know that there is nowhere on earth like Silicon Valley. Nowhere else that is structurally designed to help you make whatever you can imagine into reality.
Hundreds of sites ordered deindexed
A judge has ruled 700 domain names to be seized and removed from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Google searches, on suspicion, not proof, of selling counterfeit goods. Whether the domain names are local or foreign, infringing or not, or even valid but caught-in-the-net business sites is immaterial. They are ordered seized and taken down without notice or recourse. Of course, there is no law to force a registry to change ownership, nor a law to require the search engines to delist in this way, but the judge ordered it anyway.
The readable future
Brent Simmons nails it again in The Readable Future, talking about the tools we all use to bypass all the ads and clutter of publisher’s sites. The future is, one way or another, readable. Because that’s what readers want, and because the technology is easier to find and use and learn than ever. That trend will continue because developers live to give people technologies that make life better.
Copycats
Matt Legend Gemmell writing on Copycats: There’s an entire spectrum of terms available besides ‘copied’, ranging from “inspired by” to “plagiarised”, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be influenced by the work of others. The key is to ensure that you’re consciously agreeing with a design, rather than just aping (mimicking unthinkingly - a definition which no doubt does our hairy cousins a grave disservice). Sadly, much of the technology sector simply apes.
Almost no-one changes their settings
Following up on my recent I just want a Hamburger post, I came across a wonderful article by Jared Spool entitled Do users change their settings?. In line with that I said about developers thoughtfully making decisions on options for their users, Jared makes some beautiful points Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. Why? They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise.
If your site does ..., you hate your Customers
There has been a lot of talk on the Internet lately on the inability for web site visitors to actually read the content on publisher’s pages because of all the annoyances and clutter on these pages. If you are one of these publishers, read on, this is to help you identify what frustrates your customers. If you are a reader like me, let me know of any major annoyances I may have missed out on.
If your site displays a full page ad for 15 seconds before an article can be read, you hate your customers.
If your site splits articles, even short ones, into multiple pages, you hate your customers.
Should I wait?
As a technologist, I am often asked by friends and family whether they should buy a new gizmo now or wait a while for the next release of said gizmo.
I always have the same answer:
If you need it, buy it now.
I just want a Hamburger
Or too many choices lead to the inability to choose.
In the USA, when one walks into a restaurant to eat a hamburger, one has to endure a full interrogation. How would you like the burger cooked? Would you like cheese on it? What kind of cheese would you like? Would you also like bacon on it? Lettuce and tomato? Onions? Raw or Fried? Mayonnaise, ketchup, relish or mustard? Which kind of mustard? Do you want fries on the side? A pickle too? Sesame on the bun? Raw or toasted?
Give us a break. We want a hamburger, make by a professional in the making of hamburgers, and presented to us as the best mix of ingredients prepared properly that they believe makes a great hamburger. We did not go in there to make choices, we went in to eat a delicious burger, pay and leave.
It turns out software users want the same thing. Product, made by us, that satisfies their needs, without the options and choices and interrogations that make using it difficult, confusing and dissatisfying.