Web applications are a little more challenging to design than websites. Designers need to anticipate user behavior, make users’ lives easier and make the experience as visually appealing as possible. Many designers tend to do what is easier for them than think about what’s easier for the user. The following is a small list of tips that designers often overlook in the process of designing a web application.1. The Power of a Good TooltipWhen you present your web application to a potential customer, the last thing you want to do is ruin your lovely graphic design work by plaste...

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired....

I've come to avoid using the word "Simplicity" or its variants ("Simple," &c.) It means too many different things to different people.For example, my original land-line phone was simple:It's simple by eliminating extraneous use cases. It only handles one user scenario, the one that was the most common when it was invented. If we think of the number of affordances and the number of uses, this kind of simplicity lowers the number of affordances by lowering the number of uses. I call this kind of simplicity "Economical Design."There's another kind of simple, a kind of band-aid simple. You sta...

Good Idea or Bad Idea?I’ve got an idea for a product. I’ve talked to some people. I know some people in the industry. I have been cold calling others. The idea is promising. The price point people have agreed with is about where I would like it to be. I’ve shown some mockups around and iterated on them. Now, I feel the need to start writing code because, well, I like writing code. And I’m comfortable writing code.But I see lean people.Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Jason Cohen, Ash Maurya, and a thousand other blogs think I should talk to X people in Y stage...

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, and how I got a job. I'm assuming, judging by the relatively small amount of mail I got from a random ...

Yesterday the NPD Group issued a report on U.S. tablet sales in the U.S., from January through October of 2011. Worth noting up front is that the numbers in this report are about sales — actual tablets sold to actual customers — not “shipments” from the factory to stores and warehouses.Much-reported on is that second-place went to HP, after its fire sale on the discontinued TouchPad. What hasn’t gotten much commentary is the extraordinarily contorted way that NPD reported these numbers.The report begins (emphasis mine):U.S. tablet sales, exc...

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a design could be liked by me, but disregarded by others. In spite of that, there are few things that are ...

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to assure them it’s a rational move. Their friends and family are skeptical: “How can you ...