Contrast: Fail Early, Fail Often, and Learn

contrast.ie

24 points·unalone··7 comments

Unfortunately our education system doesn't embrace this philosophy. I've known students who didn't take Calculus in high school because it would hurt their GPA. When we focus too much on initial performance we tend not to take risks and as the pottery example illustrates fail to learn.

This blog post is basically an excerpt from "Designing User Experiences" by Bill Buxton.

I have mentioned the book before as one of my faves. Bill Buxton is a brilliant guy and all hackers should check out the book.

I loved the message of the book - I only found the first half (a description of the problem) to be useful and eye-opening, however, since the second half where he tries to offer solutions to overengineering or underdesigning products seems a bit haphazard and random.

Definitely worth a read though just to open people's eyes about the problem with most software engineering. I've found this issue at 2 of the 3 startups I've worked at in the last year.

For a usability site, it's a really confusing interface, and the text isn't that readable either.

Really? I didn't really look at the main site, but the blog portion seemed like... well, a blog. Nothing nonstandard, as far as I could tell. And the font was just blown-up Helvetica, though the letter-spacing did seem a little wide.

The spacing hurt readability and I didn't know where to look when I first clicked on the link. Links to old articles seemed to run on together and were the first thing that grabbed my attention, and I had no initial sense of what they were. As I said...confusing.

Huh. I suppose that just shows the subjectivity of such things; I found the site to be quite easy to use and well-designed, other than the letter-spacing.

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