a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• removing features, you can't please all of the people all of the time. sometimes, you have to make a few people really unhappy in order to make everyone else a little bit happier
• the cost of being everything to everyone
• featuritis vs. the happy user peak, give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. and whatever you do, don't give them new features just because your competitors have them
• tough love, when it comes to feature requests, the customer is not always right. if we added every single thing our customers requested, no one would want our products
• more about deleting features, the thing is, these are features that some people somewhere use and like. and they'll be sad to see them go. its worse than skunks-in-the-fridge, its exploding skunks in bed
• feature removal, if i could never remove features, i'd never add any
• bad gravity, developers and powerusers are not sitting around wishing for more complexity. quite the opposite! but they do wish that some apps fit them better. and in many cases they wish for less complexity
• volvo gave away the most important design they ever patented
• mcdonald's theory, i use a trick with co-workers when were trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. i recommend mcdonald's. an interesting thing happens. everyone unanimously agrees that we can't possibly go to mcdonald's, and better lunch suggestions emerge. magic!
• broken window theory, social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken
• turn up your speakers and take a wild ride on a shuttle solid rocket booster
• mail from the (velvet) cybercrime underground
• level design lesson: to the right, hold on tight, good level design is informed by an understanding and anticipation of how the player will move through the game world. all design considers how a thing will be used, and level design is no exception
• transitional interfaces, computers are jerks and love to fill in the gaps linearly because they are lazy sacks of wires. a great animator/motion designer spends most of their days fighting computers to make sure they don't mess this up
• why good programmers are lazy and dumb
• a field guide to developers
• don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
• manipulated photographs, manipulated memories
• los intocables, photography project by erik ravelo