best practices

Postel’s Law | Laws of UX Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Home | Laws of UX Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces. Aesthetic-Usability Effect Chunking Cognitive Bias Cognitive Load Doherty Threshold Fitts’s Law Flow Goal-Gradient Effect Hick’s Law Jakob’s Law Law of Common Region Law of Proximity Law of Prägnanz Law of Similarity Law of Uniform Connectedness Mental Model Miller’s Law Occam’s Razor Paradox of the Active User Pareto Principle Parkinson’s Law Peak-End Rule Postel’s Law Selective Attention Serial Position Effect Tesler’s Law Von Restorff Effect Working Memory Zeigarnik Effect

German Naming Convention Using as many words as necessary to clearly name something. Everything. I called this “German” naming convention as a reference to the fact that the German language is known for its compound words, which can become comically long and specific at times.

How to write a cold email Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people. This is almost universally true. They read their own email. Moreover, they’re good at responding to email. They’re very, very curious people. They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket. The perfect cold email is Short and grabs attention. Super clear on who you are. Value prop for the receiver. Has a specific ask.

Your Essential dbt Project Checklist | dbt Developer Blog If you’ve been using dbt for over a year, your project is out-of-date. This is natural. … This post is the checklist I created to guide our internal work, and I’m sharing it here so you can use it to clean up your own dbt project. … with this in hand, you’ll at least know what you’re looking for.

All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces” … when it comes to the distributed systems at scale what’s more important is an ability to “dig” into data - “slice and dice” it, build and analyse various views, correlate, search for anomalies… And systems that offer all of this do exist. Wide Event is just a collection of fields with names and values, pretty much like a json document. If you need to record some information - whether it’s the current state of the system, or an event caused by an API call, background job or whatever - you can just write some Wide Event to Scuba. ...

How long is the ideal vacation? Researchers weigh in | Business News | nola.com It takes a few days to truly unwind and start to forget about the work … Vacationers seemed to reach that point after about a week away, … … vacation afterglow only lasts for about a week after returning to work, regardless of the length of time spent away. To get the most out of your time off, researchers suggest taking multiple vacations spaced throughout the work year, with getaways ideally lasting between seven and 11 days. ...

Good design, much like anything, starts with understanding the basics. Applying the following design principles will help you avoid design disasters and allow you to communicate your key theme. You’ll find that it’s rare to see only one principle being used at a time as they all work in conjunction with each other. Alignment Repetition Contrast Proximity Balance Source: The 5 Basic Principles Of Design – Maddison Designs

A good error message has three parts: The problem – explains that an error has happened; The cause – explains what caused the problem; The solution – explains how to overcome the problem. After you ensure your message contains all these three parts, its time to review it. You need to edit it to ensure it: Is user centred – avoid jargon and words your audience will have an hard time understanding; Is direct – as William Strunk said, “Put statements in positive form. Avoid tame, colourless, hesitating and non-committal language”; Omits needless words – cut, cut, cut. [ Source: ]{style=“color: #404040; line-height: 1.6;”} How to Write Error Messages ...

Dave Snowden introduces the Cynefin Framework with a brief explanation of its origin and evolution and a detailed discussion of its architecture and function. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/ )

{width=“280” height=“291”} By Dave Snowden : The name serves as a reminder that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, as well as through collective experience (…) The framework provides a typology of contexts that guides what sort of explanations or solutions might apply. (…) Obvious [Simple] Tightly constrained No degrees of freedom sense-categorise-respond → Best Practice Complicated ...

7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI The Rules: Light comes from the sky Black and white first Double your whitespace Learn the methods of overlaying text on images (see Part 2 ) Make text pop— and un-pop (see Part 2 ) Only use good fonts (see Part 2 ) Steal like an artist (see Part 2 )

Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility) – PragDave Back to the Basics Here is how to do something in an agile fashion. What to do: Find out where you are Take a small step towards your goal Adjust your understanding based on what you learned Repeat How to do it: When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier. And that’s it. Those four lines and one practice encompass everything there is to know about effective software development. ...

#GamerGate [Online] Survival Guide | Jon Jones, smArtist Here is a quick, streamlined guide on how to keep yourself safe online and make harassing you and tracking you down much more difficult. Two-factor authentication on everything. Password manager for unique, difficult passwords. Install PrivacyFix. Lock down old Facebook posts and adjust your privacy settings. Domain name whois guard. Delete old accounts. Check the internet for your personal information. Use a VPN. Extreme options… See also: ...

Not all technical debt is born the same, because A Mess is not a Technical Debt . (via TechnicalDebtQuadrant )

for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change. Kent Beck

The philosophy of great customer service | Derek Sivers (Actually, I prefer the term “client care”, since “client” implies a relationship, instead of “customer”, which is transactional. But I’ll use the normal term instead of confusing things by using mine.) You can afford to be generous The customer is more important than the company Customer service is a profit center Every interaction is your moment to shine Lose every fight Rebelliously right the wrongs of the world

10 Surprising Pricing Strategies That Can Boost Sales Similarity can cost you sales Utilize price anchoring The secrets of Weber’s Law Reduce pain points in the sales process Reframe the product’s value Bundle commonly bought items Sweat the small stuff Appeal to utility or pleasure It’s either free or it isn’t Try out an old classic: ending prices with the number 9 Emphasize time spent vs. saved Never compare prices without a reason Utilize the power of context Test different levels of pricing Keep prices stupidly simple

There is, however, old wisdom — perhaps from an earlier version of the Mac HIG — that says how to create error messages: they should be of the form “Can’t x because of y.” They may optionally include additional detail and/or recovery steps. “Can’t x because of y. Something is true. Try a thing.” A similar form is this: “Noun can’t x because y.” (As in “‘Downloaded.app’ can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.”) ...

The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain — Overthought How to Test Your iOS Battery Drain Head on over to Settings > General > Usage and check out your times. The key to look for is that your Usage time should be significantly lower than your Standby time (…) So here’s the test: write down your usage and standby time, press the sleep/wake button (…) to put the device to sleep, and set the device down for five minutes. When you come back, take note of the change in time. ...