Don’t be everything to everyone. This is important to remember for people, businesses and in this case, software. Have an opinion. Be loved and hated. Be a strong brand.
This interview/discussion between Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal: Technology) and Jason Fried (37signals) covers a lot of good points. And many of them apply to much more than software development. It is worth watching even if you couldn’t care less about software.
A few takeaways:
It is good to say no. Helps keep your idea/product/business simple.
WWSJD - What Would Steve Jobs Do? Probably say no. This had helped lead to Apple’s success.
A company should have an opinion.
Being hated & loved is better than being (UMA) universally moderately appealing (I just created a new acronym).
Consider your customer’s experience first. Open source projects often fail, in the consumer market, because the customer experience is not considered first. Open source software is built from the code out, instead of the interface in.
Hej Du! This post is for Grizz, who seems to repeatedly lose the email message that contains his favorite video… I wonder what my grandkids will be teaching me someday?
I have been a long-time user (in Internet time that equates to somewhere between one week and a few years…) of TinyURL.com to shorten long, ugly URLs into something a bit more manageable (and copy & paste-able). The service is quick and easy and does what it promises, but it is U G L Y. Almost to the extent that I don’t want to use it.
If you feel the same way and are looking for a similar service that is easier on the eyes, check out RubyURL.com
As for other URL shortening site designs, does this URLtea.com background make anyone else’s eyes go crossed?
From a company often praised for it’s intuitive graphical user interfaces (or “guituitivity“) comes a good example of a bad user interface. The iTunes “Clean” and “Explicit” tabs are backwards and inconsistent with the rest of the GUI (and the metaphor of Tabbed documents).
To me, the tabs above show that we are currently on the Explicit version, not the Clean. Why would the darker inset “Clean” image apply to the light colored pane we are currently viewing? I have been tripped up by this several times.
From Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:
Take advantage of people’s knowledge of the world by using metaphors to convey concepts and features of your application. Metaphors are the building blocks in the user’s mental model of a task. Use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment.
Tabs, in the real world, are visually linked to the document you are viewing.
Although, The iTunes design team seemed to get it right on the front page:
Here the lighter tab is connected to the lighter pane below, as it should be. The darker tabs, when clicked, pull other pane’s to the front.