stylejam

Thanks for the tip. You like the idea or only the design? :)

Oh my, silly me. Should be fixed now, and thanks a lot for the catch.

There is no way, and I don't think Dribbble is an OAuth source. Thanks for the suggestion though, I will look into that and maybe ping Dan C. to see if it's possible.

Clickable: http://stylej.am

When I came to work in th US I was actually totally surprised that americans work so many hours less. In northern Italy it's unthinkable to go he at 5PM.

No problem at all, it happens.

One of the topics I cover the most there is the difference between startups and agencies/freelancing.

While startups tend to look at results (the ones that survive), agencies tend to look at the customer, at least most of them.

I actually believe that most designers coming from an agency would be eaten alive in a startup, along with their "photoshop skills". This people don't even know what UX means, never conducted a usability test (usability = I look at the website and say what I think), and definitely don't read HN.

Hi, there are no Amazon Associate links: the only one Amazon Associate link I can think about is with Flanagan's book, and Mr. Flanagan is the associate, not me. I just thought removing it wouldn't have been polite.

When I could link the book's website, I did it.

I leave out visual design because lots of startups that meet every goal you can eventually imagine (ginzametrics, bingocardcreator) don't even go close at having a decent visual design (no offence intended).

I believe visuals are also a very subjective matter, and belong much more to the "talent" side of things, than to the "knowledge" one.

Should be critical, yes. But if you know the market, you know that things like usability or ux are used 90% of times as buzzwords from sellers. I'm afraid I can't disclose some of my experiences with top design agencies in both the US and Italy, but trust me, I've got a truckload of horror stories :)

Sure, I wasn't commenting on you obviously, just talking about me :) Sorry if I wasn't clear.

I believe that focusing on a single product is an unbelievable learning experience honestly, and is the real gain for designers, but your point is still valid.

I guess you mean conversion and not conversation. A/B testing is part of every sane design process, there's no "divination", only iteration. Knowing the process of design would definitely help here.

I don't really understand your answer - conversion should be point 1 for every design, call it graphic, call it web, call it interaction, but you suggest it's some kind of "pro" service. In my opinion it's not, a design that doesn't convert doesn't have any business value. For what reasons someone should pay for a website if that website doesn't have any mean or any return? You understand that this is exactly what I'm talking about? A customer buys something that has no use and no impact, of course he wants to spend less, and he is damn right. And that's also why I say that a designer must be a designer, if you have no clue about human interaction you're simply not a designer - can you imagine an industrial designer crafting some crap without any idea about how the user will interact with it? No, it's totally laughable, that's why it doesn't happen.

What I'm pointing out is that "what you want" or "your spec" is wrong. What you can and should ask to a designer is: here is my homepage, I want people to understand this and then signup. What happens now is that customers ask for a website they like. You see the problem?

You're probably a developer (my wild guess), you don't have a problem like this. If I have to make a parallel, it's like your CEO comments your code because he coded on the CBM 64 during the 80s. Exactly the same thing.

Good enough in web design is a website that is kind of clear and kind of converts. If it's ok for the customer it's ok for me, but considering that I hardly believe it's ok for the customer here we have a big problem. And there's no such thing as a "perfect logo" :)

Customization can actually be an important part of a business model. The problem is how to behave when it's not part of it, and here I agree with the author, the customer is asking for "something else".

I've been in a startup that used to say yes to every stupid request possible to get a customer and yes, it destroyed the product, because we had some general and generic features available to everyone and a lot of stuff that was very specific and not reusable. This means that even if you get the client, you're raising maintenance and development costs (and probably performance - if it's very specific if/else are your friends) without investing in your product and in future clients, and this is very bad for a business, because the customer owns the product and you don't.

Actually, I believe it's the single worst thing that can happen to a startup - case is, it always happen when who is in charge is not a tech guy but a seller, and the reason is that while costs are hidden to his eyes (developers do weird things in dark rooms) the benefits are high.

Unfortunately, you're gonna pay such decisions sooner or later :)

Should be fine now.

Better ? Thanks for pointing it BTW

I'm apparently the only one from Seattle.

I understand what you say, but unfortunately it's not correct. We believe that our decisions are 100% analytical and conscious, the result of a thinking process, but reality is that our old and middle brains are almost always in charge and deeply influence our decisional process. For a primer I suggest "Neuro web design", you can find it on Amazon, it's pretty short and has a generic approach to the matter. Anyway, desirability and in general influencing a potential customer shouldn't be thought as some kind of cheating, it's completely natural and I dare say honest. Especially because a product that is badly designed is unlikely to influence us (and it's clearly written in the article). You're probably particularly interested in the concept of Personas and mental models.

Well, if you're choosing a suboptimal solution (a new page) over an optimal solution (the ajax call) there's definitely something wrong ... FWIW, I strongly believe that a worst UX will bring less conversions, but I don't have any data to bring.

I would try S3 as for now

It's a guess, but if you're part of the community (and I am) it's at least an educated guess :) I'm developing in Ruby 1.9 as well.

Especially because if the main argument is that "it works" you're not discussing the merits of the language, you're simply stating that it's turing complete (yes, you can do "everything" with it) and that it works (HINT: whitespace works too - http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/). Doesn't seem very good points to me, but some kind of catch all statement: if it works for you, why in the hell should I have to question it ? :)

Where do you see process buzzwords ?

Very nice article. I would also like to add that writing features definitely helps in providing a sound MVP. I'm quite surprised that nobody thinks that one of the reasons a MVP fails can be the quality of such MVP, where quality != number of features. Writing Gherkin features shows clearly what kind of application flow I'm implementing, and it happens a lot of time that I notice a step that is just unnecessary or overly complicated. Even mockups are not as meaningful as scenarios, because they don't describe the application flow or state changes.

I'm not saying that you must use BDD, only that to me it's very useful to do so for my own startup, that's all.

Reading the other posts it also seems that people spends a lot of time testing unnecessary things, like a facebook login. Guys, just shoot a mock object that returns true or false, Facebook works, trust me :)

I agree with the article about all the other points.

I agree 100%.

I don't think I'm doing anything illegal here, by posting the coupon that Manning sent out for free yesterday to the subscribers to the "Deal of the day" list. This coupon will permit to buy this book (paper and pdf) for 25$: dotd1205ccb

I highly suggest this book, it's definitely one of the best about Erlang. I also suggest subscribing to the ML, some books from Manning are great (thinking about the joy of Clojure for example).

Honestly I think this is my personal funniest post of 2010. And no, it's not making fun of Haskell.