alabut

16 ms·

121.
by alabut 15y ago
This is Joel's humorous version of what Steve Blank refers to as "knowing your market type"[1]. Steve classifies them as new vs existing markets (there's also a third called "resegmented markets" but those just sound like existing markets t
122.
by alabut 15y ago
Walt Disney had the same attitude during the 30's. I'm reading his bio (it's crazy how similar he was to Steve Jobs) and he's been quoted as saying the Depression was the best thing that ever happened to their studio because not only did
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Show HN: a mailing list generator for Github repos
9 points by alabut 15y ago|2 comments
124.
by alabut 15y ago
There's a subtle shoutout to The Checklist Manifesto - that book is amazing. I thought it was another GTD-style productivity book but it's not, it's a lot more than that. It studies several seemingly unrelated fields like medicine and const
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by alabut 15y ago
Cool, sounds like a fun gang. I didn't say anyone's not awesome, just that each is different and that the natural variation in types of skills also seems to carry over to sketching styles.
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by alabut 15y ago
That was before they hired their first real creative director, Jamie Dihiansan, and now they have a variety of sketching styles, from rough and quick to clean and organized: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1880-the-different-sketch-sty...
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by alabut 15y ago
That's a fair point - just because the portrait orientation works for most sites doesn't mean it works for all sites. So have I got a tip for you, friend. In case your wife hasn't found the right paper for her project yet, the best thing
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by alabut 15y ago
The limiting factor is reading habits, not browser size. Just because you can design in a landscape orientation doesn't mean you should and wider isn't necessarily better. It's not like magazines are 3 feet across because paper's cheap, rig
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by alabut 15y ago
Nice! I like sketching so much that I devoted a big part of my portfolio to talking about my prototyping process: http://alabut.com/work.html Pro tip: buy a sketchbook that has both a 24 column grid and browser chrome, so it'll feel more
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by alabut 15y ago
Maybe more like a llama - still around but nowhere near as useful or in the same numbers. Llamas were like the cows of the Aztec era.
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by alabut 15y ago
I thought waterfall was a strawman too, until I read The Checklist Manifesto and started learning more about other industries. For example, large-scale construction projects like skyscrapers are run by gantt charts and committees, which sou
132.
by alabut 15y ago
That's a great writeup! I know exactly how you feel except my disappointment was doubled, because I was a hybrid developer/designer for years before completing the switch from developer to designer and I lost the faith in both agile and UX
133.
by alabut 15y ago
Nope, it has nothing to do with the commonalities in people or roles, sorry I wasn't clear. Let me try again. It's a knock on all rigid processes and dogma, not agile in particular. I trimmed the rant down by taking out the sections that ri
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by alabut 15y ago
I've got a bone to pick with people that have a bone to pick with waterfall, especially when they don't realize that whatever competing newer workflow they swear by is actually waterfall in disguise. Let's just ignore for a second that a wa
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by alabut 15y ago
Al from EmailYak here - I'm happy that people are finding the service useful as it looks now, but we're also going to overhaul our design and explain the service better. Here's a sneak preview: http://alabut.com/projects/emailyak/home.png
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by alabut 15y ago
A design equivalent for me would be to start with low fidelity mocks (quick paper sketches, gray boxy wireframes, whiteboarding) before going for higher fidelity and adding visual polish. Like how this: http://dribbble.com/shots/230767-Sta
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by alabut 15y ago
What was interesting to me was not the subtraction of mistakes but the addition of tone. You wouldn't mistake PG's writing style for John Gruber's, for example. PG's essays have always struck me as similar to Ernest Hemingway's, who had a t
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by alabut 15y ago
re: the braindump on the first draft - Ernest Hemingway said he'd "write drunk, edit sober". Steven King wrote a rant on the same topic, about throwing away dictionaries and spell checkers while in the zone, otherwise you risk getting sucke
139.
by alabut 15y ago
True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned. I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro
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by alabut 15y ago
Everyone is making (probably well deserved) ad hominem attacks on the ad agency, but the principle of structured creativity isn't a bad one. Steven King once said his muse is a drill sergeant with a flat top lurking in his basement. The boo
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by alabut 15y ago
I've been pleasantly surprised by Google Drawings recently. It's like somebody took Omnigraffle and trimmed it down while also making it easier to share.
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by alabut 15y ago
You were at Stripe so briefly that we couldn't even get over to that side of the room before you left! :)
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by alabut 15y ago
It's true that people in a usability test don't behave exactly the same as at home, but that actually proves my point. If they're obviously trying to be positive and helpful (no matter how much you tell them to relax and be honest) because
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by alabut 15y ago
There's a balance to be struck because the polar opposite - discussing features rather than benefits - is the norm and it's worse than ineffective for the average user, it's confusing noise. I just came back from running two days of usabili
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by alabut 15y ago
It's the same rationale as the fashion designer Michael Kors and why he's been wearing the same black shirt, black blazer and dark jeans for years - to become "post-fashion" and have his own signature style that he doesn't have to think abo
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by alabut 15y ago
There's a great new movie about the design of cities called Urbanized and it has a section on New York, Jane Jacobs and her fight with Robert Moses: http://urbanizedfilm.com
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by alabut 15y ago
It feels like just yesterday that you rolled it out. I'm sure it felt longer to you :) Good job Andrey!
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by alabut 15y ago
I was so happy to see that my dogs stayed on the pricing page after the recent redesign of isocket, thanks for featuring them! Strangely enough, it's probably one of the more popular things I've ever designed. Using humor in your marketing
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by alabut 15y ago
Holy shit, he read my mind. We're just wrapping up our yc application for http://inboxissues.com - a browser extension that is a bridge between customer support emails and the github issue tracker. We've been calling it rapportive for sup
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by alabut 15y ago
Thanks for catching that text! Funny story - we've been focused on other related projects this summer because we launched part of the underlying tech as an API (called EmailYak) just to get it out of the way so we could start prepping for t

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