- Search bar has to be well integrated with the primary navigation.
- Alignment of the search text field & the search button.
- Search text field has sharp edges while the button is slightly bigger and has rounded edges.
- I think increase/decrease your text size is redundant. Your target audience is programmers or people who want to learn programming. They already know how to zoom in/zoom out.
- Instead of showing an image of how to create an array. Wouldn't it be awesome, if we create a simple interactive shell where-in you show how to manipulate strings (reverse, capitalize etc. It will get user's who are new to Python excited about the language and its simplicity.
All these books are great but they are theoretical in their approach. It's good to be knowledgeable about Golden Ration or Fitts Law but it wouldn't be of immediate help on your next project. The books for Hackers should be pragmatic in their approach and not very theoretical.
The books I recommend are:
Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams. It focuses on topics like Consistency, Alignment, Proximity, and Contrast. With these four rules, you can make 90% of your designs look good. It also explains briefly on what colors and typography to use. When you've firm grasp of the fundamentals, it would make sense to arm yourself with more theory.
Don't make me Think by Steve Krug. It teaches you to simplify and focus on the end-user.
Major problem is responsive design, its not scalable for content heavy sites. Same code scaling for different screens, makes sense in theory but is nightmare in practice. I've been part of couple of projects where-in we learnt the hard way. Hence, you don't see any big site use responsive design in major way. Almost all sites (Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart) go with a different sites for mobile & desktop.
Also the use of white text on dark background is extremely hard to read. Hence you see pretty much every content-rich site uses white or light background with dark/grey text. An exception might be Myspace which went with dark background approach and failed miserably in engagement.
When using any site, we like consistency. By incorporating panels which open up from both left and right side, it provides an inconsistent feel while using the site. My usage might be completely different from yours. It is important to keep the overall layout consistent with content personalized based on users needs.
This is exactly the reasoning that pisses me off. If MS pulled the same shit, we would be out with pitchforks ready to bury them. Have some consistency. Any corporation using their monopoly product to provide a bad experience for competitive products is evil.
First they block access to Youtube API. Now they decide to block access to Google Maps. Free and Open Web BS is just going too far. I don't think there is absolutely any part of the web which is free and open. It is conveniently used from time to time to convince people to contribute to their platforms.
I would like to disagree with Mr.Param who is either being a cynic or trying to be "me-too".
India is aggressively moving away from paper-ballot voting to EVM's. In our last general elections, a million electronic voting machines (EVM's) were used which reduces vote-rigging, ballot capture etc. In maybe 5 years, we will be completely rid of paper-ballots.
I keep them in a private folder on Dropbox. I can easily sort them by their names and I can access it across all my devices as Dropbox has a client for all popular platforms.
HTC did the same with their HTC Desire phones. I own a HTC Desire HD and I regret buying an Android phone as the only update I received was 2.3 with their Sense UI crap-ware. I've lost faith in Android ecosystem with early users being denied new features and security updates because they want users to upgrade to newer phones.
Some Startups with bad Design have managed to do very well (Craigslist, Ebay etc), but doesn't mean all the startups with bad design will do well.
Good Design is necessary, it is what makes you subconsciously love something and use it more often.
Just because you are rejected by VC's or YC doesn't mean anything. Even best of the VC's make mistakes, here is a firm which missed companies like Apple, Intel, Google, Paypal, Ebay etc...
Facebook for Android has close to 1 Million users, does that mean Android has sold 1 Million handsets (It has 300,000 activations everyday).
I think assuming that everyone in this world is on Facebook is a wrong assumption.