Don't Make Me Think

I loved Don't Make Me Think. It takes you inside the mind of the user (of your website). And it tells you who they are, what they expect and what confuses them. And the golden rule is, of course, don't make them think.

Some videos

Lately, I've been watching some cool videos on software development. Here they are, along with my notes on them:

UI Fundamentals for Programmers, by Ryan Singer.

Base UI on a Model
Be explicit and use a lot of language.
Break screens out w/ REST
Least Effective Difference
Screen -- design from the inside out
Flows - think about actions. Split
every action into 3:
 1. start: how to i get to it?
 2. middle: post note.
 3. end: where do it go afterwards?
Fonts:
Small sizes, < 10px, Verdana. But not so good for larger sizes.
Lucida Grande lot

Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department, by Seth Godin.

Ideas that spread, win.
Build marketing into the software.
Make it connect.
TV thinking -- average products for average people.
If you're gonna interrupt everyone, you'll have a product everyone will 
will wanna to buy.
You're solving a problem that most people don't think that they have.
Clutter is not your friend.
You deal with clutter by making more clutter.

Do something totally different.
And people will talk about it.
At the edges, people wait in line.

Don't force new medium, but
build stuff that fits the new medium.

You are in the story telling business.

Hard to make money in the middle.

The new way:
(1) be remarkable -- encourages people to talk about it
(2) tell a story about it
(3) THEY spread the word
(4) and THEY come for another story

Build a tribe: help people connect
with each other.
Build a tribe: stand up for something
remarkable.

Manuel Blum's Advice to new Grad Students

I liked this collection of advice to grad students. Some quotes:

• Books are not scrolls. [...] Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere. In the case of mathematics or physics or anything especially hard, try to find something anything that you can understand.
• Consider writing what you read as you read it. This is especially true if you're intent on reading something hard.
• I once asked Umesh Vazirani how he was able, as an undergraduate at MIT, to take 6 courses each and every semester. He said that he knew he didn't have the time to work out his answers the hard way. He had to find a shortcut. You see, Umesh understood that problems often have short clever solutions.

Hacker News bookmarklet

A bookmarklet for Hacker News.
It helps you read comments. It does 4 things:

• sort by root comment, newest to oldest (byParent)
• sort by latest reply in comment thread, newest to oldest (byReply)
• shows you how many people have replied to your comment (example "4 replies")
• updates page with new comments and marks them as such (reload)

Here is the bookmarklet: hn.js

Here it is under bitbucket: hnjs

Sorting restructures the DOM. Only the reload function hits the server. Of course any changes to the HTML will break this badly. I've tested this with FF 3.5 & Safari 4 under OS X. And under latest Chrome in WinXP.

37signals on business & software

Lately I've been enjoying these videos by 37signals: 37signals.speaks. So refreshing to see these guys talk about business and what makes good software.