3 ms·
Most consumer technology products are much more complicated under the hood than they appear to be to regular consumers. Even most programmers -- who are well a
by TulliusCicero 7y ago
Most consumer technology products are much more complicated under the hood than they appear to be to regular consumers.
Even most programmers -- who are well aware of the hidden complexity of the products they themselves work on -- usually seem to believe that this must not hold true for the products of other companies.
For every feature you're aware of on a random consumer tech product or service, there are probably ten or twenty more that don't concern you, that you haven't seen, or that you don't care about.
- xenospn 7y agoI read somewhere (can't remember where) that Airbnb had a dedicated team of 13 engineers and designers working on the welcome email alone. Getting the CTA "just right" resulted in a huge difference in conversions.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAnd the nice thing is that’s all public. So if you’re designing your own CTA, just copy Wal-Mart’s or Amazon’s or Airbnb’s and voila. In a way, I wish I got to work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds just to get a 1st-Hand view of their processes. Would beat any “LEAN” course.
- xenospn 7y agoOh if only it were that simple :) I don't think Airbnb's CTA will work for anyone but Airbnb.
- dickjocke 7y agoThat's a great point I always struggle with coming up with UIs for side projects, but really everything I come up with will always look cheap compared to the efforts of 13 experts.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoIf I had a week to think how to design a good button, I would design a good button.
- sjg007 7y agoI mean you could go work for them? McDonalds is highly optimized fast food but they have a quality issue. Breakfast and chicken nuggets are about the only thing they do well. Walmart is getting better with e-commerce and online groceries. I think that’s the future. If in were Bezos, I’d be worried about Walmart. Target needs to step up their game too especially around grocery delivery and pickup.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoThe question is could they have achieved the same with two people. When I was contracting I was always surprised how outwardly similar businesses could have vastly different IT functions. Sometimes an order of magnitude larger for no apparent gain.
- CydeWeys 7y agoDon't forget the multiplier on how many more internal systems a company has vs its external ones. It's not uncommon at all to see thousands of engineers at a large company working on internal-only systems, covering the full gamut of every need of a large corporation. Hell, even just the facilities management systems for the office spaces are complicated.