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> Many are built with great design in mind.

I've gotta disagree simply because a lot of the people posting to ThemeForest are just trying to make a buck on their hobby - so many of those themes look exactly alike; they're not spending significant time thinking about the usability of their designs and just applying trends. TemplateMonster back-in-the-day was more reminiscent of designers with experience creating unique enough templates to be modified/used for multiple types of purposes.

mnicoleon Show HN: Felt – Personal, handwritten cards mailed from your iPad

No, I was definitely implying that it looks unnecessarily similar.

mnicoleon Show HN: Felt – Personal, handwritten cards mailed from your iPad

The idea is great, but you should probably change that writing tool UI.

http://www.fiftythree.com/assets/images/paper-header-bg.jpg vs. http://www.feltapp.com/assets/images/step2_ipad.jpg

mnicoleon Adium Redesigned

Personally I think Adium needs a lot of work, both in UI and functionality. I've used it for a long time, but I'm not particularly happy with it without going out of my way to extend it with add-ons, especially when it comes to IRC. Would love to help on a project like this where I could (design, etc).

mnicoleon How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

Instead of feeding the trolls responding to one aspect of my post that nobody actually has any evidence of either way (David brings it up with the weak defense that he thinks people are too quick to rush to sexism and that's a "problem" -- as if being quick to be an unnecessary asshole isn't the overarching issue to begin with), here are some relevant quotes from her initial post that illustrate why the private repos are important:

> I’m lucky to have friends in this industry that know me in person and through my work, and thus feel more compelled to speak up.

> I evangelize open source whenever I meet new coders or go to meetups. I tell them to make something that they would find useful and put it out there. Can you imagine if one of these new open sourcerers took my advice and got this response, without the support I had. Can you imagine?

And her follow-up:

> The emails I got really stuck out to me. Some people had their own stories that were way worse than mine. Sadly, several said that this is why they’d never open sourced anything.

mnicoleon The biggest deterrent for women in tech

The issue is even having those LEGOs to begin with, rather than worthless new [pink, sparkly] fashions for her Barbie. Personally, I was obsessed with American Girls because of how they represented historical times and had stories about their experiences living back then, even though my parents couldn't afford the dolls themselves. I also enjoyed having a dollhouse because it allowed me to problem-solve spatial situations while keeping design/foot traffic in mind. Having one that was modular/extendable would have been amazing, too. Little stuff like that.

mnicoleon The biggest deterrent for women in tech

I'll highlight these since it comes up here a lot (and is the second comment on that page, right underneath the ever-expected kitchen joke) --

> Geek technology culture not appealing:

> Women: 20.6% Men: 34.3%

> Dispel stereotypes that boys are better than girls in math and science:

> Women: 48.9% Men: 31.0%

Working in technology is appealing to girls, but growing up being told that's not what girls do is what hurts.

mnicoleon How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

This is an issue regardless of these incentives. It's the same as being told your brother must have gotten you into gaming; just being a woman isn't enough for you to be an individual with your own brain.

mnicoleon How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

No one's saying women need to be coddled; the problem is that people recognize that the current state of the industry/the internet are jerks. You can only tell people to ignore bullying so long, especially when those doing the bullying aren't being punished, but those that are being victimized by it are being told to instead change this perceived weakness about themselves.

People should not have to worry about being made fun of while they're trying to learn something difficult. Recently we had that female Mozilla employee whose code (for a personal project, no less) was made fun of by three semi-prominent developers on Twitter. The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl. In bringing the issue up, two of the three apologized, with the third going the route of "It isn't my fault you are offended,".

That is why it is important to foster good relationships, positivity and trust early-on. It has nothing to do with treating anyone like a princess and everything to do with the truth of how people treat women online (and off) and allowing these girls to find mentors and people that inspire them that they can better relate to.

The commenter you linked to doesn't realize that within that repo, there's a Team of everyone that signed up for this, allowing them to start projects and teach amongst themselves. That is the end-game here; allow people to learn without concern. No one seemed to have a problem with the concept of private repos before this and the Ada Initiative's private repo was highly successful; I wonder why.

mnicoleon How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

I don't think it's condescending; I think they're just trying to say that anyone can accomplish anything even if it seems the odds are against them. Would you be just as offended if it said "teenage boy?"

The second statement you call out is important because -- and I wish I could find the interviews -- many female entrepreneurs admitted that it was difficult to get funding for projects that didn't have a female skew. That is not to say that gender-biased ideas aren't valuable, but pushing women to work on women-centric issues is already a problem.

mnicoleon How A 17-Year-Old Girl Won a Hackathon

Except she wasn't interested in tech. She just started participating in the things her dad did because she was interested in the musical component of some of his projects.

Not everyone has the convenience of having a parent in the industry to get them interested and keep them going, spurring them with ideas and creative solutions along the way. She landed there by chance and look what she's done. Everyone deserves such opportunities.

mnicoleon Avoiding Burnout

Totally agree, I think the Kudos system implemented in Svbtle and other clones is fundamentally broken until there's a way to undo it. Just hovering and waiting in place for a trivial action is a pain (and many people toggle with it accidentally thinking it's some whimsical animation), no less that being at the top of the page is completely backwards in itself; put it at the bottom after I've already read the post enough to judge it.

mnicoleon The flattening of design

> Steven Heller, co-chairman of the M.F.A. Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and author of more than 150 books on design culture, said that part of the push toward flat design was to try to escape the overabundance of design that looks digital, where things “have started to look cliché.”

The irony. I would disagree; it picked up because people tried to make the case that it was more user-friendly under the guise that simplicity/cleanliness = understandability at the expense of affordance. Some interfaces can get away with this, others cannot. I'd say that most cannot, simply because most designers are designing out of aesthetics, not fundamental usability.

Commenter Trevor has it right:

> It's amazing the justifications being used for a new design trend.

> No, a flat design is not required because of mobile. In fact, with the advancements of CSS and HTML, which mobile phones are driving, designers can do non-flat designs easier than they ever could. If there ever was a time when flat design was a required because of technological constraints, it was 15 years ago when all we had was CSS1.

> Nor is flat design "less distracting". A musical note tells no more inherent of a story than a shiny sparkling CD. Icons exist within the cultural context. Now that CDs are becoming obsolete, a musical note might make more sense to indicate music. But whether that icon is rendered flat or not has no bearing on it's usability.

> The flat design trend is just that, a trend. Designers get bored of using the same style. So a new style emerges. Technologies and culture may provide minor tweaks and constraints, but most of it is driven by the fact that the current design has been around for a couple years now and designers want to try something new.

> Let's accept the new trend as a trend and stop trying to justify why it is "better" in some absolute sense.

mnicoleon Calling All Hackers

No, thank you! I really liked this post and I think it's something we should be looking into more considerably. I've found it very interesting that many new programmers - many of them women, at least from what I've witnessed - create another language as one of their first projects (which is not surprising, since that'd probably be high on my list, too). While they're intended to be friendlier, they are generally under the guise of being made for children; complete with silly shapes and colors and storylines. But why just kids? Why do we feel like it isn't acceptable for adult tools to be just as fun and easy to use in their own ways? It's a lot like why we aren't doing more to utilize our collective physical exertion to answer problems in the same way computers can contribute to efforts like Folding@Home and Bitcoin mining or our eyes/knowledge for things like Snapshot Serengeti and reCAPTCHA.

What drives me in working in UX is just my own confusion and frustration with the way things are. Something does not need to be complicated to do complex things. I should not feel stupid looking at immense lines of code when I know that there are better ways to accomplish the same goal (in the same, if not shorter amount of time). Something that doesn't make sense right away probably has a problem, even though the person next to me may have the experience or luck to not have the same issue. If that disadvantage can be avoided, it should be.

Naturally, I've had a lot of ideas on how to make things better, but I can't wrap my head around building those things and I would rather find someone else equally as passionate about the issue to work with than just anyone off the street.

I think why people get so uppity by the "everyone should program/build/create/do" idea is because they are concerned about their job security. They believe that educating the masses is going to lead to oversaturation. Some are concerned because they are doers, not thinkers, and thinkers with these tools would threaten their ability to get by on the bare minimum. It's limiting them more than they think.

In reality, like any knowledge discipline, it can only create better tools, which create more/new jobs and thus create a better future.

mnicoleon Calling All Hackers

I may be wrong, but I think some of the current commenters are missing the point (re: everyone should program, gender doesn't have anything to do with it). I think the question posed here is that if we care so much about fixing things; why aren't we fixing the most fundamental problem of making it easier for people to build things, as having that extra brainpower can only exponentially help us short- and long-term? That is not the same as everyone learning to program or learning to think in ways that don't come naturally to them, but rather creating a much more well-rounded methodology for completing these tasks that makes it easier for all of us.

That's what I took from it, anyway.

mnicoleon Kentucky Derby Bans All Interchangeable Lens Cameras for ‘Security Purposes’

Churchill Grounds says that the measures were developed after consulting with several law enforcement authorities following the Boston Marathon bombings last week.

Wait, what? Weren't those photos helpful? Wouldn't surprise me if they were using that excuse to keep people from being able to profit off of their photography, but like the blog states, the extensibility of the lens doesn't matter when smaller models can still outperform their larger, extendable counterparts.

mnicoleon Thirty Women In Tech Below Thirty

I think that when we're including non-technical founders and marketing managers, it waters it down. Not to belittle anyone's achievements on the list, but realistically, you might as well put women working at Geek Squad on here, too, as they're inherently more technical than some of these titles. There's no reason to grasp at straws when it just takes some phone calls and emails to tech companies asking who their all-stars are.

Instead, these lists are almost always done by nomination (as this one was), which means in the end it is just a popularity contest for those who knew about it. Even if you didn't know who that person was, chances are enough people did to get them there in the first place (or worse, it was gamed).

Not a fan of outsourcing your content to whoever can put a name in a hat the most.

mnicoleon Thirty Women In Tech Below Thirty

Possibly a little OT, but am I the only one tired of "Under 30" lists? We already have a problem with ageism in this industry and when it comes to women, I think we're really doing a disservice to those who have long been in the field (and dealing with the problems that brings) but haven't gotten the recognition they deserve.

mnicoleon The dangers of eating dogfood

By the last paragraph, I get what he's saying (too many companies build something they'd never pay for in hopes that there's an audience that will), but I think he's arguing two different - but vital - aspects of testing.

There's dogfooding and there's finding users at all levels of experience (both in internet proficiency and experience with the type of software/service you've built) who have little/no incentive to use your platform over the competition. The best apps I have come across have had their community managers leverage me and ask repeatedly for my feedback and how to make things better. What else am I seeing going on in the market? How intuitive is that action? If this tool didn't exist tomorrow, where would I go and why? If a user isn't willing to take the time to answer these questions, move on to the next person.

Reaching out to the right people here means free advertising and loyalty, in addition to fixing the problems you don't come across internally.

mnicoleon Why is Facebook blue? The science of colors in marketing

While color psychology is an excellent topic, I think this post relies too much on data that isn't reliable/was meant to be marketing linkbait vs. legitimate research.

The real tell-tale in those buttons are their styles rather than the colors. If you took the solids and lined them up as palettes, it would be a lot more difficult to parse. The infographic showing the emotion colors correlating to their brands does more to prove that big and bold is what matters, not the hue (and honestly it looks like someone just pasted all the logos they could think of, regardless of if they supported the meaning/emotion). I'm not even going to touch the gender-based one. I tried to reach the single URL that Kissmetrics lists as their proof but it no longer works (also why don't they have HTML versions of their data?).

At the end of the day, it really comes down to how color is used. There are lots of great books and blogs on color psychology, and I'd suggest looking into those instead.

mnicoleon When empathy becomes insulting

Why would you expect people to be okay with the fact that the support center they called can't help them? You literally have one job to do and that is managing their emotions and feeding them [falsely] empathetic lines in a tone that doesn't lose their loyalty. That's why people don't last in call centers; it's often just an intentional waste of resources to buffer you from the people who can do something about your issue because they don't care.

mnicoleon Show HN (again): Download free PSDs made by Dribbble users.

Other freebie resources:

http://psddd.co/ (pulls posts tagged with "psddd")

http://freethroww.com/ (pulls top posts that are freebies)

http://dribbble.com/tags/freebie (all posts tagged "freebie")

mnicoleon SF Restaurant Sign Calls Yelp ‘Bully,’ Integrity of Reviews Questioned

Chiming in to remind people that Oregon is a one-party consent state -- which means so long as you say the conversation is being recorded at the beginning, everything is good. This does not go across state lines, however.

mnicoleon My girlfriend tries to explain my startup in 90 seconds

Despite the Reddit-esque linkbait title, I could understand the sentiment about someone being worried about doing a ShowHN themselves.

However, my problem with the video is that it didn't really add anything to the non-audio version of the same video currently on the homepage. It mentions the exporting, but doesn't show it. It speaks to responsive, but doesn't show it. I'm not sure if these features aren't baked in yet, but I didn't get anything out of the audio version that I didn't get from the non-audio one coupled with the features page. In fact, the voiceover distracted me from what was actually going on with the demo (particularly looking at the weird stuff going on at the bottom) because it wasn't talking about what was going on as it was happening nor the extensibility of the features being shown, but rather just spoke to the product as a whole from someone that seemingly doesn't know what the scope/final product will be.

Since she's non-technical, it probably would have sold viewers a lot more if she'd been using your tool to create her own page to show just what a breeze it actually is to use.

In the same vein, I think your website could really use some work; the video of the product should go at the top, not the weird <video> of the skewed color-picker (that doesn't need to be there at all, really). Your features should also be on the homepage.

Also, considering the current crop of alternatives in this realm and the more advanced options those have (http://webflow.com/ in particular), I think it would benefit you to show your pipeline and what people can expect down the road.

mnicoleon Top 10 CSS Generators

After being frustrated with half-assed CSS tools for far too long, I finally came across http://www.visualcsstools.com/. The interface is much to be desired, but as far as what it's capable of and how it accomplishes it, it's the best I've found.

mnicoleon Unicorn

That doesn't really add up if he's saying it was originally from Github and he doesn't know the source. I still think you should find some original art, which it looks like you are.

mnicoleon Unicorn

Seems weird considering @dshaw uses that image across all of his web properties - https://twitter.com/dshaw, http://dshaw.com/ (top right), http://geekli.st/dshaw

Even in the event that he did give permission, doesn't seem like he thought it through that people would automatically associate it with him (or Github). I'm also not going to make assumptions about all of his talents, but he mentions nothing about illustration across any of his accounts. Did he actually make the original? Even if he commissioned it, it seems like it would be up to the artist to decide whether or not it is used for other purposes.

Just found this tweet:

Daniel Shaw ‏@dshaw 20 Sep 11 @bkudria The angry unicorn comes from @github's old 500 page. It was originally left facing as you have it. Don't know the original source.

If I were the guys from this site, I'd really reconsider the name and the logo. Just too many crossed threads.

mnicoleon Stocks Plunge, Quickly Recover, on Fake Tweet

To be fair, that was his first day and he was needlessly swearing trying to pronounce the guy's name right after not checking to see if they were live, and then completely fumbled once his co-anchor turned it over to him. I think it was completely reasonable for them to fire him over that - no one would have taken him seriously afterwards. Also, if you look at his actual written news reports on that network's site, they were littered with misspellings and grammatical errors, and the background on his official Twitter has vulgar statements that just don't line up with the profile picture of him in a suit. He's all-around unprofessional and that might have been the icing on the cake.

mnicoleon Ask HN: What is wrong with our UX?

At the homepage I'm presented with two options that are not relevant to me, and I have to strain my eyes a bit to find the alternative link (light blue on a very saturated cream) that just dumps me on a page full of everything. Too overwhelming.

What if instead of assuming the user is there for two reasons or no reason at all, give them a list of potential options. I'd assume most people going to the site are doing so for birthdays, so being able to sort by age, gender or interest is relevant right off the bat. I can't ever find the site that I felt did this best.. I want to say it was called "Wanttts"/"Wanted" or something.

As far as that initial selection is concerned, if you decide to keep it, I should only need to click once on my option to have the filter activated instead of clicking once on the option and clicking a second time to submit that option. I'm now two clicks into Father's Day and there are zero options for me, and I can't click my back button.

As a normal user, I'd be frustrated enough with the site at this point to leave it and go to Amazon.

Now clicking into Mother's Day gifts, I'm presented with radio options, despite the fact that my mother could be all of those things. I click on Stylish & Whimsical (which honestly doesn't even make sense for these two to be paired together) and get a list of 5 items that are neither stylish nor whimsical (a knife, a bland sweater, a set of wooden coasters, a rainbow headwrap and some wine glass lamps). In fact, my mom would probably roll her eyes at all of those. They are simply not thoughtful gifts.

As a normal user, I'd probably be done with the site at this point.

The star on each image is way too big and insinuates I'd be favoriting the item for later rather than adding it to my shopping cart. I didn't even read the text above it because I thought it was a page title (as it's an H3), not instructions on how to use the site.

So let's say my mom is equally silly and into knives, so I click the star on the knife in hopes that I'll see other gifts like it. No, instead I'm on a screen that tells me the price of the knife and would I like to add it to my cart. I click back because I'm not sure what that page was all about and I'm taken all the way back to the homepage where I'm being told to start all over again.

As a normal user, I'd definitely be done with the site at this point.

Okay, let's try this again.

I go through the exact same process, clicking the exact same options.. and I get different results? Where were all these options before? Five random options is just not enough for me to feel your site is effectively helping me choose something personalized. Again, under Stylish & Whimsical, I see items that are neither (perfume, cheap-looking bookstand, tacky seedboxes, a Samurai umbrella (what?) and a wire cage shaped like a barrel for corks).

Having the notification show up on the "View Gifts" button is the reason I clicked on it before, because I assumed that was the next action, even though the header tells me to click on the star to show more options. Progressive actions should be on the right side, stagnating/reverse options should be on the left. Likewise, the only time a button should be orange or red (unless it's notably thematic across the site) is when it is a negative action. A shopping cart view in particular should be in the top/primary navigation.

In continually clicking through the suggestions, I'm not finding anything that makes me think that the initial category I selected at the beginning has anything to do with the gifts I'm being shown, nor does it look to be actively filtering based on additional things I keep starring. And as noted before, all of these gifts are pretty bad/cheap-looking.

- - -

TL;DR

- The design needs a lot of work (the palette, the UX) and it should be a lot easier to navigate and understand what is going on. As others have mentioned, taking control of the back button is a terrible idea.

- The items you have aren't thoughtful/curated enough and the photography is weak (not that you can help it necessarily, but a better design would lessen how much it affects the overall appearance and I'd imagine that the more luxury the brand, the better the photos). When I'm looking for gifts using services like this, I'm doing it because I want to find unique items; probably gifts that cost a little extra to begin with. The items on your site are all things I could find on Amazon within a few clicks. If I wanted ThinkGeek-quality gifts, I'd go to Spencer's.

- Have users search by more specific keywords/interests instead of trying to lump people into categories they either don't fit into at all or that multiple could apply to.

There are a lot of gift-searching sites out there, and a lot of them have these same issues. What problem were you trying to solve with site? Why would people use a specialty service to find the same types of things that show up on Google Shopping or incentivized Bing Shopping searches? I guess I don't understand why already-popular vendors are listed at all. Gift-finding services should be about highlighting unique gifts that are handmade or crafted by specialists, curated by tastemakers. You don't need to advertise for Nordstrom's.

mnicoleon Instacart Launches Costco

Awesome, thanks!