joshuago’s software_engineering Bookmarks

You stare at the thing all day, years on end. Of course you think the UI looks tired.

But once I started getting people to view and interact with my prototypes, I realized that one of the big problems was that people didn’t give good feedback when the prototype you present to them is too perfect.

As important as they are, flows are hard to communicate during the design process. Drawing out every state of a flow is too time-consuming. And drawings become instantly outdated as screens change. On the other hand, flows written down into stories or paragraphs are hard to reference and don’t easily decompose into checklists for design and review.

If you're a regular at a restaurant and the staff has one off-night, you can be patient because you know the food is worth the wait. If it's your first visit... not so much. And, importantly, you probably won't return. Initial impressions count, in software and in everything else.

What you should remember when you hand out “free” software is that if that software doesn’t work as advertised, it’s unreliable or the documentation is non-existent or misleading then you are doing its users harm. While you may not be legally liable for such deficiencies you have an ethical responsibility to ensure what you deliver does what it says it does.

Safari comes with everything you need installed, and the tools themselves are very stable. And they even look nice, which makes debugging less of a drama.

Lack of discipline, big egos, being bad communicators, forgetting about the customer, and not prioritizing work properly.

Faced with the choice of spending time on the elegance of the implementation, or the intuitiveness of the interface, companies will optimize for intuition; open-source projects, for elegance of implementation.

Lazy registration, progressive disclosure, forgiving format, clear primary actions, breadcrumbs, account registration, required field markers, steps left, subscription plans, and hover controls.