We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

Yep.

Evan Williams:

Numbers are important. Number of users is important. So are lots of other things. Different services create value in different ways. Trust your gut as much (or more) than the numbers. Figure out what matters and build something good.

Really, really great presentation about UI in gaming, heck, even in general by Derek Sakamoto a senior UI designer of Hearthstone, the card game from Blizzard.

Ryan Singer:

What is at the core of an interface design? I think of the design not as a collection of screens or buttons or pixels, but as a collection of jobs that the user wants to do. In this article I want to give you a feeling for how to think of interfaces as made up of jobs, each with a beginning, middle and end.

I first read this in his site Felt Presence, now he repost it in Medium. Medium have been killing it lately, so many smart people started publishing their writing there.

Jason Kottke on the Apple Watch:

The promise of the Apple Watch is to make it more convenient to send & receive notifications and quick messages, although many of the reviews make it clear that Apple hasn’t entirely succeeded in this. In the entire history of the world, if you make it easier for people to do something compelling, people don’t do that thing less: they’ll do it more. If you give people more food, they eat it. If you make it easier to get credit, people will use it. If you add another two lanes to a traffic-clogged highway, you get a larger traffic-clogged highway. And if you put a device on their wrist that makes it easier to communicate with friends, guess what? They're going to use the shit out of it, potentially way more than they ever used their phones.

This made me think, also applies to any technological progress, time will tell how Apple Watch will fare.

Also as an aside there’s an Apple II Watch, so nerdy and cool.

Nishant Kothary:

We’re punching ourselves in the, well, gut, by continuing to pit intuition against data. It’s not one or the other. It never has been, and as much as we try to sell the narrative, it never will be. They are both mandatory in sound decision-making.

As of my previous note on the optimization of everything. Nishant points out that the data and intuition dichotomy have no merit. We should view them as equal, data and intuition. Using both would do wonders with the design and engineering decision. Read the whole piece, it’s short and well worth your time, even the comment thread.

Virginia Heffernan for the NYT Magazine:

A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute.

For optimizers, all values flatten: There’s optimal at one end and the dread suboptimal at the other. This can be freeing for those who get worked up by emotional, political or moral language. In theory, through optimization, arguments can be dispassionately adjudicated and then resolved without tears. You find Inkwell, the true black-and-white Instagram filter, beautiful? Sorry: Instagram photos filtered with the purplish monochrome Willow get way more hearts than Inkwell photos. I’m just saying. I mean, it’s just data.

A witty and sobering article, pointing out our insatiable hunger for data, data, and more data. Knowing the metric for everything and the value of nothing.

Is this the future that we want to build?

Sacha Grief’s new gig is a good one, a guide for building a great community. The site also looks great. Definitely on my reading list, and yours should too.