In “Life, below 600px,” Paddy Donnelly talks about “giving the fold the finger” (i.e. making visitors scroll isn’t really THAT bad) and uses the 37signals home page to support the cause. “What I’m proposing is for you to think twice about these ‘rules’ which are preached so often around the web and aim to create something original.”
Wonderfully conceptualized, beautifully executed public service ad from Sussex Safer Roads. One of the best ads I’ve ever seen.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
As long as we’re doubling up, Marco Ament is chiming in at the comment thread of yesterday’s “shoot themselves in the foot” post with some more great thoughts.
Success, as measured by installed base or revenue, doesn’t strongly corrolate to quality. A lot of mediocre products are extremely successful, and a lot of extremely successful products are mediocre.
I can’t argue that Microsoft Word or Firefox haven’t been successful, and I won’t argue that they don’t deserve their success. They both try to be everything to everyone, and they’ve largely achieved that, hence their success.
But, like most independent or small developers, I have neither the resources nor the desire to be everything to everyone, and I don’t like the experience of using most products that were designed in that way. Being everything to everyone incurs huge costs in complexity, reliability, and efficiency that I can’t afford, that I can’t tolerate in products I use, and that can’t result in a product I can be proud of.
Later on he explains why he feels comments are a net loss for the vast majority of comment-enabled blogs.
“Side effects of developing for yourself” is an interesting piece by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper (a simple tool to save web pages for reading later).
In it, Marco talks about how features only get developed if he wants to use them. That means a big NO to the following: unread-count icon badge, tags, full-screen reading (where you tap to temporarily show the toolbars), comments, and Graphical Mode (“It’s one of those features that people say they want until they actually use it and realize that it’s not worthwhile at all.”)
Does this mean he’s not listening to customers? No, he’s just not letting them steer the product.
I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot…If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.
Great to hear about Marco’s strong point of view. And I can vouch personally for the results: Instapaper is the iPhone app I use the most.
On a related note, “Feature checklist dysfunction” is another post by Marco where he rails against checklist comparisons. Here he evaluates the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
“Sounds like a terrible product. I bet it will fail.”
Refreshing to see a design firm publish what their services cost and what you get with the engagement. –Design Vineyard’s site
For all the experts in the world, there’s a lot of unexpectedly going on. Quite a bit of more/less than expected too.
It’s been too long since we redesigned this blog. Years and years. It’s time for a complete redesign. We thought it would be a good idea to eat our own dogfood and choose a firm from Sortfolio to do the redesign.
On March 8th we’ll choose a firm listed on Sortfolio to redesign Signal vs. Noise (this blog). The firm will be a paid Pro listing, we will not consider free listings for this project. If you want to be considered, please upgrade your listing to Pro.
The budget for the redesign will be $8500. The time frame will be 30 days from start to final delivery of HTML/CSS templates. We’ll do the integration with our back end systems. The scope will be redesigning the overall look and feel, the main page including all the different post styles (long-form article, video embed, quote, link, etc), a post page with and without comments, the archive page, and possibly one more page yet to be determined.
We’d like the new design to accurately represent the 37signals aesthetic and brand, but we’re open to exploring alternate directions too as long as they are consistent with what we stand for. We can talk more about this with the firm we choose.
We only want to consider firms that want the job. So here’s how it’ll work. If you are a Sortfolio Pro member (you have a paid listing), and you want to have a shot at the project, send us a tweet in the following format:
Hey @37signals, we want to redesign SvN. http://sortfolio.com/YOUR-SORTFOLIO-URL-HERE #sortfoliosvn
Your tweet must be in this format to be considered. We’ll review your work and get in touch if we have any further questions. We may also contact firms who haven’t tweeted if we think they may be a good match.
We’re excited to see how this works out.
In this article, David Pogue mentions Netflix’ neat technique for letting viewers fast forward streaming movies.
Remember, these videos are streamed to your TV (in other words, played from the Internet as you watch), so fast-forwarding and rewinding is a problem. The part of the movie you’d want to fast-forward to hasn’t arrived at your house yet.
Netflix pioneered the clever workaround: when you press the right-arrow key, little thumbnails of coming scenes flash by, representing 10-second intervals. You wait about 15 seconds for Netflix to resume playback at the new spot.
Here’s a look at the UI in action as you scroll to the right:
Time: 22:08 | 02/16/2010 | Download MP3
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Jason and David answer your questions
We recently asked, “What topics would you like to see us address?” And you answered with a bunch of good ideas. In this episode, Jason and David run down the list and answer in rapid fire style.
Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.
REWORK is in stores March 9, 2010. Pre-order today from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, and 800-CEO-READ.
You can also watch the first REWORK trailer.
You’re an online dating site. You’re going up against much bigger competitors, like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony. You could spend big bucks on advertising and marketing. But what you’ve tried in those areas didn’t really work.
But what if you start promoting by teaching? You’ve got a treasure trove of data. What if you take a Freakonomics-esque approach to all that info and use it to answer questions and reveal surprising twists?
That’s exactly what dating site OkCupid has done at its blog with posts like The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures, How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, and Exactly What To Say In A First Message.
By turning its by-product (all that data) into something useful, OkCupid is getting on more and more radars. That post debunking the conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.
The blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks…Since OkCupid started its blog, the number of active site members has grown by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 million, according to the company.
“We’ve been up for six years,” Mr. Yagan said. “We’ve only had the blog for six months. It’s a big deal for us.”
Great lesson there. What has your business taught you that’s interesting, noteworthy, or surprising? Share it with the world and get people talking.
REWORK Q&A with Jason at 800 CEO READ.com. Questions include: What are some of the ways that “big” can work against a company and their ideas? How and when does productivity best happen? And this one:
How is spam more than just an email issue?
Spam is a way of thinking. It’s an impersonal, imprecise, inexact approach. You’re merely throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. You’re harassing thousands of people hoping that a couple will respond.
Press releases are spam. Each one is a generic pitch for coverage sent out to hundreds of journalists you don’t know hoping that one will write about you.
Resumés are spam when someone shotguns out hundreds at a time to potential employers. They don’t care about landing your job, they just care about landing any job.
Spam is basically a half-ass way of getting someone’s attention. It’s insulting, really.
A much better route: Be personal. Call someone. Or write a note. If you read a story about a similar company or product, contact the journalist who wrote it and pitch them with some passion. If you want a job, write an amazing cover letter that explains why you’d love to work there.
Don’t rely on the shotgun approach of spam though. If you invest nothing in your interactions, you probably won’t get much back.
Also, kind words from 800 CEO Read’s Jon Mueller about the book:
This isn’t just a book about changing your business, it’s about changing how you think about business, and is, perhaps, one of the most important books you’ll read this year.
Pre-order REWORK. (In stores March 9, 2010.)
A great rework of the table of contents. Linchpin, by Seth Godin, briefly describes each chapter instead of just giving the page number. He turns the TOC into an opportunity to summarize the contents of the book for a new reader, not just tell them where things are.
Survival and profit are fine, but if you don’t have values or “higher purpose” at the heart of your business, you may be losing out in the battle for the hearts and minds of customers, suppliers and employees…
[Jason Fried] recently broadcast a 100-character challenge to his 24,000 Twitter followers: “What’s missing most from business today? Not sales. Not service. Not technology. Answer: A point of view.”
That’s more telling than the speeches last month from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and Lawrence Summers, economic advisor to Barack Obama who told the World Economic Forum at Davos we must all build a better capitalism that “reflects shared values” and a “common morality.” A manifesto bubbling up from successful young entrepreneurs on the front lines of global marketing and collaboration is worth two dozen top-down political rants…
A company known for having a point of view and commitment to community generates a payback worth more than money: Trust.
—Rick Spence in What do you stand for? [Financial Post]
Derek Sivers’ 3-minute TED talk.
Yesterday’s post “Design Decisions: Campfire transcript headings” explained how we arrived at this new header for each transcript day:
Several commenters disliked the black border:
Wow. I like the update but it is almost impossible to read “Today, February 9 in…” since the black border takes all the attention.
+1, the huge, repeated back border takes all the attention and makes my eyes cry.
I also find the thick black borders more distracting than useful in this situation. Maybe you should make them a little less thick or give them a less harder black color (gray)?
Viewing the header in isolation, I understand their concerns. But I also see what our prez would call a “teachable moment.”
See, this is where using real data to judge a design becomes so crucial. When you fake it or use lorem ipsum or just view a design in isolation, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions. That black bar does look very heavy in this context.
But check it out once you start using real data:
Totally different story now. Now the black bar doesn’t seem that heavy at all. In fact, it’s a great way to break up the data so you can see a new day has arrived in the transcript.
Real designs come from real data. Anything else is an abstraction. And abstractions can be real tough to judge accurately.
Related: Use Real Words: Insert actual text instead of lorem ipsum [Getting Real]
Yesterday’s post “Design Decisions: Campfire transcript headings” explained how we arrived at this new header for each transcript day:
Several commenters disliked the black border:
Wow. I like the update but it is almost impossible to read “Today, February 9 in…” since the black border takes all the attention.
+1, the huge, repeated back border takes all the attention and makes my eyes cry.
I also find the thick black borders more distracting than useful in this situation. Maybe you should make them a little less thick or give them a less harder black color (gray)?
Viewing the header in isolation, I understand their concerns. But I also see what our prez would call a “teachable moment.”
See, this is where using real content to judge a design becomes so crucial. When you fake it or use lorem ipsum or just view a design in isolation, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions. That black bar does look very heavy in this context.
But check it out once you start using real info:
Totally different story now. Now the black bar doesn’t seem that heavy at all. In fact, it’s a great way to break up the data so you can see a new day has arrived in the transcript.
Real designs come from real content. Anything else is an abstraction. And abstractions can be real tough to judge accurately.
Related: Use Real Words: Insert actual text instead of lorem ipsum [Getting Real]
Yesterday, we pushed an update to Campfire that added some new functionality to the transcripts screen. You can read the details in this post on our product blog, but I wanted to share the thought process on a small change we made as part of the update.
While working on the “Files, Transcripts and Search” tab in Campfire we noticed that the heading for each transcript day was kind of a mess. Here’s what it looked like before the update (the image has been reduced, click to see it full size):
The design has essentially four elements using 3 font sizes, 4 colors, and 2 font weights. It certainly gets the job done, but it adds a lot of noise to the screen and can only make scanning the page slower than it needs to be. Contrast is essential to differentiating elements of a design, but here everything is unnecessarily different from everything else.
As we looked more critically we also felt like the link to read the transcript could be more obvious and that the link to delete a transcript was far too prominent for a feature that is rarely needed.
Here is what it looks like today:
The redesigned header reduces the contrast between the date and room name to just the weight of the font — a good example of least effective difference. The link to read the transcript is now explicit, reducing confusion, and the delete transcript link it subdued. Aligning it to the right keeps it out of the way where it is less likely to be accidentally clicked. Finally, a heavy black rule decidedly separates each day while giving each entry some visual weight.
The new design retains the same four elements as the original but by reducing unnecessary contrast, and refining the arrangement makes it feel like fewer to the eye. This results in less clutter and better scanability. It’s a small change that we think makes the whole page better.
