It's at a brilliant price point and I think that's why the sales are doing pretty well. I wonder if the Nexus 7 is also sold under cost similar to the Kindle Fire?
I'd say that most of the value from an MBA program is through your peers rather than from books. To complement the reading, I would recommend reaching out to other entrepreneurs.
Great work but I do have questions about the security implications. I'd love to have a chat if you have some time. I'm trying to do something similar (button popups and involves money) but we're non-competing.
I agree. I definitely the guidance it provides - it helps me to align my interests with open source. Kinda like online dating with an open source project. I was enthusiastic to contribute to the Django project but had no clue what to do.
Yes that's the problem. The landing page is pretty good, but when you click you're send in the usual Mozilla's maze. What makes me sad is that they're not looking for content strategists, UI designers or UX specialists.
Can somebody tell me reasons why UI designers or UX specialists are more difficult to outsource?
I know that many open source projects have difficulties attracting them, but I really don't know the reasons (any reason designers working in this field gave me also should apply to programmers - thus they also couldn't answer this question).
1) Visibility. Code isn't visible to the end-user, so it doesn't really matter how a programmer gets from point A to point B as long as it's bug free and efficient. UI/UX, on the other hand are exactly how your users define you, so it's not something you want to potentially leave to the programmer that just installed Gimp and learned how to use the shape tool.
2) Testing. Good UI and UX need to go through several rounds of highly controlled testing. The "controlled" part is the factor here--a group of guys in the basement isn't going to cut it, and there's no way to verify with open source communities that testing was done correctly.
3) Consistency. Design teams are able to churn out more consistent work once they've found their 'style'; multiple disparate designers are more likely to break that style.
4) Preventing design by committee. Pull request discussions for design changes could turn into disastrous free-for-alls that end up turning Firefox's chrome neon blue and each button red because the majority of random devs think it's 'cool'. Design is more successful as a dictatorship than a democracy.
I started writing a response about my experience as a designer at Mozilla and it got really long and I turned it into a blog post called "Code talks and designers don't speak the language." Thanks for inspiring me to come out of blog hibernation. http://skinnywhitegirl.com/blog/code-talks-and-designers-don...
"Probably the most daunting question for projects without any design lead that has the trust of the team is, how do the devs know if the proposed design is correct? Without that trust, bugs quickly devolve into nasty arguments. How you build that trust has been the subject of entire books. But the question remains, who and how do you approve a mockup? The code review process works great for just that… code."
Developers also have nasty arguments about what code is correct/the better one etc. ;-)
So this argument also should in principle apply to developers - but developers don't seem to have any problem about that point. I don't know whether the reason is simply that developers have less a problem with conflicts?
But nevertheless: there are well-established principles to judge which code/software architecture is better (elegance, smallness, extendability etc. (all of these can be judged rather objectively) - which role these play, depends on the project). I think it would help project leaders if you suggested a similar process for judging design decisions. Just an idea. If this is a bad idea of me, suggest a better one.
"there are well-established principles to judge which code/software architecture is better" There are very similar principles for judging which design is better (affordance, natural mapping), it's just that coders don't know those principles.
You're implying a value judgement that code is an objective discipline and design in a subjective discipline. There are aspects of visual design that are subjective. However, UX is a testable, repeatable, objective discipline that is informed by the work of cognitive science.
Yes coders have arguments... with coders. They have inside baseball arguments. It's entirely different than a designer having an argument with a coder. Often, the designer has to teach the coder the principles of design in order to even engage in a logical, productive discussion.
The overriding point I was making is that the tools like github are designed for code, not design. Our tooling inherently advantages code. It's a pain in the ass to even insert an inline image into a comment. Github isn't built for evaluating mockups and wireframes. Designers do our best to bootstrap into the tool, yes. But it's not our tool.
Fantastic blog post! You have a much more optimistic approach that I could learn from. Too often I find myself saying "Because I said so, dammit! You code, I design!," but the idea of building trust and credibility is a good one.
One of the challenges of design education for developers is that developers are naturally geared toward rule sets, which becomes a problem when the designer decides to break the rules for a justifiable reason. Just like devs couldn't teach a designer to code in a day, a designer can't really provide all of the ins-and-outs of good design to devs. Perhaps education needs to be introduced to devs as to the value of UI/UX, rather than the specifics.
I imagine that the less concrete requirements on the UX make it more difficult to negotiate design decisions via pull requests. Typically OSS code contributions don't include design changes (e.g moving proven core components from shared state to a message queue for aesthetics), but bug fixes or very concrete feature additions which are easy to reduce to tests.
No, I'm just a simple developer whose design skills suck so much, that I don't even try to interfere with the designer's affairs (that's why I can sustain good relationships to designers, since they hate interference of customers; at least, as long as I don't try to come up with ideas like testability of designs ;-) just kidding).
I'd love to hear the security implications of the button. Seems to me that someone could easily replicate this and trick users into entering their credit card number. Am I wrong? Are there any other avenues of attack? I have an idea about something similar but since I'm no security expert, I'd love to hear what more experienced hackers think.
I strongly agree, and wish I could upvote you more. Before I enter CC details on any site, I check: is it HTTPS? Is the domain correct? The average user might not, sure, but it's there for those of us who do.
This abstracts that away. Creating a duplicate popup would be trivial, and harvesting data -- while appearing "trusted" -- is easier this way than the other way (because you don't even need to bother faking a domain).
I hope the Stripe people are taking this into consideration.
I'm glad someone doesn't think I'm paranoid. We're dealing with money at work and someone thought of the same concept - make it look clean and make it look cool but there's no real way to let a user know that this is legit. I'd love to hear and discuss what Stripe has in mind (Don't worry, we're not in competition :) )
Phishing attacks have always been possible and will continue to be possible.
Having people enter their credit card details into random online sites is always going to stick around as long as eCommerce exists. You don't have to put a Stripe button on your site for that to work.
In other words, no more insecure than any eCommerce site.
It's not more insecure, but it seems impossible for the end-user to know whether a Stripe form that just popped up is real or fake. Whereas you can first redirect the user to a well-known payment site, where they can verify the site's identity from the SSL info in the URL bar, before trusting it to enter their credit card data.
I agree. I recall when Facebook Connect was first introduced, it provided websites the ability to let non-logged-in users to login to Facebook via an inline iframe. (the experience is pretty much same as Stripe's button's approach). Facebook disabled it shortly after for the reason that I think it's pretty obvious: one can easily create an iframe login form that pretends to be from Facebook and use it to phish login credentials. Instead of using iframe, Facebook now popups a window to prompt user for login credential and app authorization. I believe it will only be a matter of time before Stripe abandon this inlined approach and switch to a popup-based solution; otherwise, they will likely jeopardize their brand/trust when malicious people start to spoof their payment flow.
Also strongly agree. And am still confused about why I had to scroll down to the bottom of the comments to find people who point out what seems (to me) obvious: there is no way in hell I'm entering my credit card into an inline frame.
Does Facebook have any plans do away with the iframe while fixing the issue? I'm trying to figure away out but it just seems like there's no way at the moment.
Thanks Duck. Definitely a great post by patio11. I've seen a competitor with "more" features (looks like an actual company) charging around $50. I'm tempted to undercut that but reading the post has made me think otherwise. I am still a bit worried that I might not get any customers at all!
I'd say that that's more of solutions to one domain being applied to a different domain. But you still need to know what problem to solve in that new domain you're trying to disrupt first.
