Tag: design

User Onboarding Isn’t a Feature

If you think of onboarding not as pointing out the weak parts in your interface, but instead as the holistic approach to delivering more value to more signups, then it becomes extremely clear that your onboarding experience must keep pace with the evolution of your product and the evolution of the market it serves.

User Onboarding Isn’t a Feature.

Less product, better

I’d rather make less product and make it better, so that my customers come back after 35, 40 years, as they are now. That’s a really nice feeling.

Frank Clegg, in an interview with Om Malik.

The End of Apps as We Know Them

In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense.

The End of Apps as We Know Them.

Muir: Yosemite Icons. The second version of Sebastiaan de With’s replacement icons for OS X Yosemite. The Rdio, Twitter, and Slack replacements are my favorites. They’re such a big improvement that I’m using them even though they break some things.

Jonathan Ive on products you can’t use

If you eat something that tastes awful, you assume the food’s bad. But when you use a product that you can’t use, you don’t assume it’s the product you assume it’s you.

Jonathan Ive – Vanity Fair conversation with Graydon Carter.

A simpler Twitter

A long time ago I used Craig Mod’s Twitter for Minimalists. It was nice. Using that in a Fluid.app instance gave me the benefits of Twitter’s web application without the distraction of having it in my primary browser.

Craig’s recent tweet about modifying the notifications panel put it back in my mind.

I find the Twitter website to include some key pieces that third-party apps lack. I enjoy seeing favorites and other activity that’s only available through the web interface. The downside is that I dislike the habit of opening it in my primary browser; I prefer distractions that take more deliberate action to open. So I threw together some basic styles and now have this running:

It helps me build a small, digital habit field around using Twitter. If you want to set up something similar here’s a Gist of the CSS I’m using. Using that in Fluid.app will require the paid version, but it’s just $4.99. I also found this handy replacement icon that looks nice in my dock.

Putting Thought Into Things:

Quality is not just the method, just the form, or just the content. The lack of quality doesn’t cumulate in a spot, it is fundamental. Quality is what holds form and content together.

Change is bad unless it’s great:

App developers need to be honest with themselves about whether a redesign is about solving a customer problem in a better way or is part of a corporate strategy.

Designer Duds:

In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results. Designers must also accept that if they don’t, they’re not actually designing well.

Status

Put together a quick theme idea tonight and pushed it live to this site. Possibly a few rough areas around the edges. Overall I’m pretty happy with it, though. Really simple to put together; though I did miss my goal of keeping it under 1,000 lines of CSS. Will need to find a way to trim 50 lines. 🙂