I've worked for David for two years. I can honestly say he is the nicest person I've ever met. Genuinely kind and thoughtful, and wants the best for the site and the people that use it.
Yes. If you're worried about someone else using your startpage, you can make it private in Settings. I'll tell you though, the startpages aren't indexed by any search engines, and personally, this has never been a problem for me.
We were actually pretty surprised to see users sharing their startpages on their blogs and such. At first we didn't really get it; I mean the only reason we made them public was so that you could access it from where ever you were without having to log in. Basically, we made start.io to act as an attachment to a browser.
But some people really do like sharing their links. Maybe it's just that they're used to sharing all their content online. One of the most visited start pages comes from a ministry sharing belief-oriented links to their visitors.
I'm not sure what un-prepped signups will use it for, but I don't really care, either. We developed this to be a flexible platform from the beginning. That's just what happens when you made a product customizable, and for a general purpose. People will shape it to their needs. The obvious example here is Twitter, which began as a service to publish away messages to the web. Then people wanted to group their thoughts to channels, then they wanted to message, now they want to network and expand their names and products. Twitter is a good example of a platform that made getting information from the users brain to a public domain incredibly easy.
Thanks for all the comments so far, this is great.
My thought exactly. Who, of all the users on IE, has even heard of a different browser? And then of these users, they decide that IE is still better? Is this like some .001% that I can't find anywhere?
Thinking Strategically is one of my favorites. It spends each chapter analyzing techniques of competition, trend, and innovation. It reads quite easily and offers outside examples ranging from sports, large corporations, and world wars.
While you may find it challenging to read straight through, it works well, too, as something to pick up every so often or to read alongside other reading material. Even for those of you without a peaking interest in business, the advice presented in the book is undeniable logic that will definitely appeal to programmers and entrepreneurs alike.
What he's saying, is that beyond our tiny sub culture of internet nerds, the average person won't be leaving SMS any time soon. The mainstream market has started getting used to that medium in the last few years and has no intention of using a 3rd party platform to replace it.
I run a homepage manager with my friend and we look at 2 very concrete statistics: signups and clicks (on the homepages). We wanted to see if we could increase our adoption rate, so we revamped our splash page.
We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?
Awesome, I love to see developers using some of their time for the small stuff like this. Let's just be glad it doesn't distribute independent music. Nice work, it looks really clean.
Who's to say that your personal criticism couldn't be compared to the same criticism many companies began receiving in the 90's when they moved the sale of their products to the internet? Remember that the internet is still so young, and it's important to keep an open mind to each step of change.
I think that if a friend really wanted to suggest a request to me, I'd rather see it in a more personal medium. Otherwise, why haven't I already thought to add them?
I agree. I think, like it's been said, that 37Signals is a special case. I believe in the field we all work in, it is wise to assume a graphic mockup as a step in the progress and then carefully decide whether or not it's a neutral step based on the history of projects you've completed. In other words, there is no bottom line.
I could maybe see this argument holding up a few years prior, but I think CS3 has had a remarkable influence on my workflow (compared to say, CS2). Having run the last 2 versions on the same Intel machine, there was immediate differences to note with the workspace and rendering times. I mean just compare the time it takes to load Photoshop and it justifies the upgrade.
I will be curious to see how lean the product stays when as the updates continue to roll in.
eBay is still much more than an auctioning service. It's a lightweight platform for anyone-- store owner or housewife-- to sell absolutely anything. The structure itself is fine, it's the community that's been poisoned. eBay needs stricter enforcements on its weaknesses: sniping, shipping costs, and PAYPAL. eBay needs to cut Paypal off with a sword and start clean. Call it something else because I will never trust that name. Never in my life has transacting money been more difficult and dangerous. The interface, the communication with the staff, and the rats that use it.
The reasoning behind the separation in these steps is for 2 reasons:
To save time on both halves. That is, the designer is designing his/her piece without worry of the difficulty, and the programmer is designing the framework without worry of user intuitiveness and style.
It so often occurs that the designer and the programmer have slightly different ways of thinking. Each party has separate concerns for the final product, and each half should be individually thinking about the future of their work and how each can be maintained.
This article may certainly apply to, and almost addresses, a programmer without a sense of concern for the user's experience and general usability.
As a front-end designer, I need the mockup process for my own sake even more than for the sake of the final product. Personally speaking, if I were to attempt complex mockups without first laying out a grid and carefully choosing my color palette, I would quickly be overcome with the duties of writing the code, and the hundreds of short-term problem solving that would arrive. My passion is never to become a flawless programmer, but it is to flawlessly design an intuitive interface. When I am creating a mockup in photoshop, what I'm doing in my head is pretending. I imagine over and over again that I am a first time user to the site, and maybe even to the internet. This duty is daunting enough without having concern over how I will make it work.
Again, this article may whisper sweet nothings to a programmer on a tight schedule, but I can guarantee you that the time to simply layout a grid and pretend will save you the time it takes to just load the monster application. And I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine a site's usability on a simple piece of paper.