Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Competing on easy

37signals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: Competing on easy

#11

Post by manmal »

dave1619 wrote: post #8

This post really made me think. If you're going after easy then I suppose you look for things that are currently difficult and you can make a competing product. This seems to open up a lot of opportunities.

Yes, and it's what Apple under Jobs has always done - they made it easy to use (where easy can mean: easy on the eyes, easy to perform tasks with, easy to buy, easy to turn off,...). And yes, it does not mean anti-complex, at least not for the iPhone - take a look into the settings screen, it's become quite huge by now.

Re: Competing on easy

#12

Post by connortomas »

navitronic wrote: post #5

Not a huge fan of their blog's redesign. The combination of the serif font, text-indent on paragraphs and lack of separation between them makes reading it a chore. One of the first times I have needed to use Safari's reader mode out of necessity.

Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...

Re: Competing on easy

#13

Post by connortomas »

dantiberian wrote: post #2

Does anyone know what it is they're building? I'm struggling to think of a market that is dominated by free that could also be made easier. Email seems like a possible bet as all the other major email providers are free.

37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.

It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.

Re: Competing on easy

#14

Post by jwdunne »

I think, as tech-savvy, I overestimate what users can do or feel comfortable doing. This makes making things easier a nice challenge.

For example, a colleague needed to check if a link has rel="nofollow". The first solution is to right click on the link and click Inspect element (he uses Chrome). This wasnt a good solution because he gave up as soon as he saw code, despite it highlighting it for him. I wrote up a quick and dirty bookmarklet as a second solution which either shows a green "dofollow" or a red "nofollow" with a black BG. This was earlier this year and he still uses the same dirty little bookmarklet. It made me realise that there are probably thousands of things I take for granted which would slow down an average user almost to a stop.

To me, it seems to unearth these things, you have to question assumptions. I assumed anyone on this planet will have the capacity to right click a link and inspect the HTML and the contents of the rel attribute. I assumed the 10 mins writing the bookmarklet would be a waste of time. I was very wrong.

Re: Competing on easy

#15

Post by ryanwaggoner »

navitronic wrote: post #5

Not a huge fan of their blog's redesign. The combination of the serif font, text-indent on paragraphs and lack of separation between them makes reading it a chore. One of the first times I have needed to use Safari's reader mode out of necessity.

Interesting, totally opposite for me. The text-indent is what demarcates the paragraphs and I found that really readable. Also Safari's reader mode also uses a serif font, for me anyway.

Re: Competing on easy

#16

Post by RossM »

I've just noticed that Backpack - a sort of personal notes and tasks tool - has vanished from their homepage and I can't find an announcement about it. Does anyone know why this is?

Re: Competing on easy

#19

Post by [deleted] »

RossM wrote: post #16

I've just noticed that Backpack - a sort of personal notes and tasks tool - has vanished from their homepage and I can't find an announcement about it. Does anyone know why this is?

[deleted]

Re: Competing on easy

#20

Post by chrismorgan »

navitronic wrote: post #5

Not a huge fan of their blog's redesign. The combination of the serif font, text-indent on paragraphs and lack of separation between them makes reading it a chore. One of the first times I have needed to use Safari's reader mode out of necessity.

I didn't even notice the serif font, because I have overridden the font-family in almost all places to the Ubuntu font-family (hooray for user style sheets!). I tried it as an experiment somewhere around a year ago. I strike the occasional website that doesn't look right and where it looks like the typeface used may have damaged it, but overall, it's marvellous. I noticed very quickly that the whole web was prettier and more readable. I tried going back, just out of curiosity, a month or two later. I went back to overriding the font-family less than a week later.

But as far as their layout is concerned, I do like the large typography, and don't see any problem with the paragraph spacing and layout. Overall, it's a nice, clean layout.

Post reply on HN