51–60 of 113 posts
> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
I'd argue while perhaps they are examples of brutalist functionality, the wikipedia, reddit and HN offer a very nice UX and a simple, easy to learn UI. HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now). Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many,…
One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…
Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point, I have a B2C bias.
I am curious about the bias. B2c still requires sales.
Edit: Apparently Reddit have a sales team since they have their own ads platform, they wouldn't need it if they used AdWords.
> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
All the comments disagreeing with this seem to be talking about "big" companies like Reddit. Think more IBM. OP's comment is very accurate.
And the 'core feature set' can be intangible features of the company, such as brand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.
How do you handle things like form submits? How do you mix rails and static files? Using Nginx?
I run a rake task to scrape all of the landing page content from the Rails app, then copy in the static docs site, and upload everything to S3. So it's like I'm using Rails as a static site generator.
Basically my root domain is all static files, served from S3 / Cloudflare. And the Rails server is running on an "app" subdomain. I think it's been working pretty well. In the future I might make the whole app static, and just use Rails as an API.
Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."
Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
Don't trivialize. The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."