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Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page

JavaScript - The Good Parts

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore's Law doesn't apply to batteries.

Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual, increasing training costs. Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products and programming languages, we want to get the core features—the good parts—right because that is where we create most of the value.

We all find the good parts in the products that we use. We value simplicity, and when simplicity isn't offered to us, we make it ourselves. My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.

It would be nice if products and programming languages were designed to have only good parts.

 

Dear @Google, your latest brilliant idea is unbelievably awful, unplug it asap. thanks.

That's impossible.

via www.frkncngz.com

Why Machines Need People - Damon Horowitz

the amount of information in people's heads positively dwarf the amount of information online. imagine your own case, how little amount of information you published online.

we use artificial intelligence not to replace people but to connect people.

I believe that as technologists, our efforts should be spent facilitating human interaction and not stimulating human intelligence. technology can not solve all the our problems for us. the task of thinking is still ours.

artifical intelligence, philosophy, human computer interaction, entrepreneurship, technology as a religion, natural language processing, human centric approach to technology, challanging yourself and much more in less than 10 minutes from Damon Horowitz... really enlightening!

Facebook Ads Will Use Your Web History

Facebook will soon use your activity on other web pages to target ads based on your interests, Financial Times reports. That’s potentially a big boon for advertisers, but it won’t sit well with privacy advocates.

via mashable.com

raise your hand up if you remember me talking about it ;) http://gercek.typepad.com/tech_talks/2010/02/css-privacy.html

Corporate Secure Passwords

if you force your users to create passwords within these constraints, they will probably write down their passwords on a piece of paper and tape it to their monitors or create a passwords.txt file on their desktop... and you will keep believing that your password mechanism is the most secure one in the world...

How UX can get the budget they want

It is no good telling them in a meeting that the existing sign up form gives a terrible user experience and error messages are poorly aligned and the copy needs improving.  They won’t care and will already be fiddling with their blackberry.  Frame it in your managers language;

• 24% drop out rate across the 5 step process
• On average, that equates to 1000 customers per month, lost
• Scaled across the 10 international sites you run, that’s 10,000 customer per month, lost
• Or 120,000 customer per year
• A customers average lifetime value to the business is $20
• $20 x 120,000 is $2.4M in lost revenue per year

via alanstairs.wordpress.com

User experience is everything

via www.90percentofeverything.com

"User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breath it. Get your whole company on board." - Evan Williams, Twitter CEO