Baldur Bjarnason

You are here #3:
the glorious wonders of online reading await you

– Baldur Bjarnason

To expand your mind:

A baby bunny nibbling on a carpet thread. The words 'this thread is relevant to my interests' are overlaid.
“You know when that phrase is in your head, and you wonder "how did you get in there, meme?"” (@cwodtke)

The modern web is bullshit #

To see the truth about the inadequacy of modern web development, the only thing you need to do is sit with your phone in the back of a café here in Bath and attempt to load up a website over the mobile phone network.

Half the time it stalls while loading some random piece of asynchronous crap that probably shouldn’t have even been included.

I’m not the only one to have noticed this development but some are more annoyed than others.

I’m so fucking sick of loading web pages and seeing “connecting to blah… connecting to blah…” and seeing shit popping in slowly and reflowing and the focus popping and all this fucking shit.

Hey, fucking remedial loading school. You put all the content needed for the page in one package. Send me the one package. BOOM it loads.

Incremental is bullshit.

Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web by cbloom (1240 words).

App development and design #

This tendency of humans to not always solve their worst problems is incredibly important for you to recognize when you’re doing early user research because it has implications for your product. Just because you’ve identified a serious problem doesn’t mean that anybody will pay you to solve it for them.

And remember, when we’re talking about “payment,” we’re not necessarily just talking about money. Free products are often only free if your time has no value. Sure, some products cost money, but people also pay with their time, attention, and effort. If you’re asking somebody to spend hours learning how to use your product, you’ve just charged them a fairly high hourly rate for your free product. You’d better make it worth their while.

Intent to solve by Laura Klein (1379 words).

If you measure the % of users who manage to figure out the basic navigational structure of your app and call it “engagement” why even bother (@_Jordan)

Two diagrams that outline the visual hierarchies of Android Wear versus Apple Watch.
“context vs. consistency” (@lukew)

Betrayed by your best customers and more #

I saw Cushion—not the name or the idea, but an undeniable resemblance to what I’ve spent the past year designing. I couldn’t sign up for it because it’s in private beta, too, but the video revealed enough to justify a conversation. I visited the Twitter page to reach the people behind it when my heart sunk even deeper—I recognized them.

Inspiration vs Imitation by (1103 words).

The #1 Slack feature I want in all other forms of messaging: auto-expanding tweets, YouTube videos, etc. Read my lips: no new browser tabs. (@mrgan)

Except it’s not that simple. Keurig blames their customers, and not themselves, for their current financial woes. Instead of removing the poorly-thought out DRM from their 2.0 coffee makers, they’re going to double-down on consumer (re)education and teach us all to love Big Coffee.

Keurig didn’t learn a damned thing about DRM by Jessamyn West (1127 words).

“GRANDFATHERED tested off the charts.” – a thing that networks say absolutely every year about something. MAKE A BIGGER CHART. (@nprmonkeysee)

Hey, look at that. Just exchanged Skype contacts with a Twitter-only friend because DM is so deficient. (Yes, Skype. Says it all) (@benthompson)