IT Really Matters

Today is a special day, because Hacker Says - the micro-site created with the help of my friend Andri Möll - got released! Wohoo!

It has interesting, funny and important quotes which apply to software development, programming and life in general. And that all is available for viewing in three different themes!

Here’s a preview of Hacker Says using Sepia theme:

Backend has been written in Ruby using Sinatra, Sass and Haml. Front-end uses JavaScript with HTML5 pushState. It is deployed to Heroku.

Have fun and put it on some large screen at your office for that extra daily entertainment!

Update #2 (2012.05.24)

Today we released an improved version of Hacker Says. We took all the feedback into account. Let us know what you think of it!

Update

These are statistics for the first two days:

Not bad at all. We got the feedback from the users to prepare for another launch with improvements. This is how MVP should be done!

Usability is one of the most required features of any website or product. If there’s no usability then there’s no product. In this short post i’m showing lack of usability on one of the most popular websites. I’m not gonna mention which website i’m talking about - i’m pretty sure that you won’t figure it out yourself either ;)

Let’s Start!

I have a conversation log and i wan’t to delete it. For this i will use the appropriate menu item under “Actions” (1 + 1 = 2 clicks):

Then i have to specify that i want to delete all the history (2 + 1 = 3 clicks):

Do i really mean it? Yes i do! (3 + 1 = 4 clicks)

Oops, what is that?

Of course it can’t be found because you just deleted it, doh! And i have to close that dialog too (4 + 1 = 5 clicks).

Conclusion

There you have it. There’s no way to make that process easier with less clicks than five and creating better user experience. Especially useful is that last error message. I don’t know what would i have done if that message hadn’t guided me through that painful process. Thank you very much! And of course good luck finding that “Action” menu item :)

This is how you delete a conversation from the gmail. Just click the recycle bin icon (1 click):

And you’re done:

Just one click! And you have this helpful message with even more helpful url to the help page if you’re still confused. And if you did delete that conversation by accident then just click on “Undo”.

Next time if you need to implement some new functionality then think twice before starting coding. Or thrice.