Archive for August, 2009
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Just a feature vs. *the* feature
hybrid is “just a feature” until it becomes the driving feature
Email was “just a feature” until blackberry showed people it was *the* feature to buy for.
Honda thought that hybrid was “just a feature” so they added it to Civic. But for people buying a hybrid to feel good about themselves it reduces the value of […]
Comments Off - Posted in Design, Life by Bo
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Optimize for acceleration
We’re bad at adapting to the second derivative. Research that I’m not going to cite here (because I’m writing a blog post, not a NYT article) suggests that if at time t, success is a point in space f(t), then we’re pretty good as a species at adapting to our location f(t). I posit that […]
No Comments » - Posted in Life by Bo
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Watching myself scan an unfamiliar webpage
Makes me realize 3 things:
I really do scan top to bottom, left to right, exactly like those eye-tracking heatmaps show.
Use of strong colors in certain regions can, to an extent, override this position-based scanning pattern.
I have only about 6-8 seconds of patience before I leave the site, if I haven’t yet figured out why the […]
Comments Off - Posted in Design, Note to Future Self by Bo
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
A sunset suspended in time
Flying west from Chicago to Seattle in the early evening leads to the expected but no less amazing phenomenon of a looking out the aircraft window and seeing the orange horizon glowing from a sunset that seems to be stuck. It’s looked pretty much the exact same out there, sun just below the horizon and […]
No Comments » - Posted in Life by Bo
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Low-ramp signup flow
mypunchbowl.com has a great signup flow – it’s after responding to the invite, which unblocks your primary task for being there. Plus, when you get to it, it’s on a page that does something else (you entering a message to send to the organizer) and below the fold. This means that by the time you […]
No Comments » - Posted in Design by Bo
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
Dev: HTML/CSS: Centering
use <center> </center> for horizontal centering only.
No Comments » - Posted in Coding by Bo
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Maybe I should worry less
maybe I would stress less about what others thing. When you really tend to get in trouble is when you really want to impress someone new that you’re not close to, because then you’ll act and do things out of character.
No Comments » - Posted in Note to Future Self by Bo
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Things I learned from Tuesdays with Morrie
People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does. High school kids are mean to each other because of this, because they’re jealous. Pride and Vanity - why do we let these valueless intangible feelings keep us from valuable tangible friendships?