As a designer who sometimes works on landing pages, I’ve found it really helpful get a horizontal cross-section of what the best people are doing for a specific page section like pricing, feature overview, or hero.
The book, and Tufte, focuses on effectively displaying quantitative information. He takes a relatively hard line about it and I have found it one of the most useful texts for helping me take "some truth the system knows" to "some truth the user knows".
Of course you have to take it with a few pinches of salt.
Firstly it is largely his opinion. Studies into this area are rather good on the general points however the fine detail is incredibly hard to study accurately.
Secondly you may not actually want to make a UI that conveys the "truth it knows" above all else. Often you want to convince the user that the UI is good at conveying information (which is not the same thing) or that it is very easy to use (which is again, not the same thing).
I heartily recommend this book because it teaches one very hard thing very well. You just have to understand that you do not always want to do this thing (yet you now have a way to start to understand the trade-offs you are making).
There are two more books, on concepts I believe, and verbs.
It's not the most practical way to learn UI design, but I enjoy how well it makes the case for good UI. Too often, I see programmers dismiss design. It seems not to fit into their scheme of values, i. e. "it's not scientific" or "it's just shiny packaging " or "it's something for beginners – I'm an expert". Then you get some guy replace all custom fonts on npmjs.com wit Arial because "all sans-serifs look the same anyway".
(the example is more "design" than "user interface" but it's the best one I remember)
One of Tufte's main themes was, I thought, that only information that directly conveys meaning should be included, and everything else should be thrown out. Where everything else, in the context of UI design, would probably be excess styling. On the other hand, I forget where I read it but we know that people are biased into finding more attractive interfaces more usable, even if a "usability expert" might disagree. So personally, I find Tufte's title fitting - he really is talking about effectively displaying quantitative information.
It's not much, but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.
I tried to let my work speak for itself by keeping the visual flourish to a minimum. I learned a lot about using white space and typography to enhance a fairly minimal design.
Because there is nothing for people to try out or play with, the portfolio is not really in keeping with the big idea of Show HN.
Given the quality of the presentation, there's a possibility that a blog post about the design process would be an interesting read and worth submitting.
Looks great. Love FF Meta. And I like your numbered side-notes. I feel like your name should be visually distinguished from "Product designer" a little more, but that's not a big deal. Nice work.
Looks very nice, good balance between overview and substance. You have both code and design in your byline, but there is very little emphasis if on problem solving using code in the cases.
I'd love to see a search interface for all webfonts, powered by an open database of data from across all the major webfont providers.
If this interface is independent of Google fonts, then you can apply it to any set of font data.
That's a good idea. I'd have to look into how to get copies of licensed fonts to analyze. Actually paying for a license would make this project completely unfeasible.
If you get the basic product up and running, I'm guessing the foundries might give you a license just because you might be able to drive some business to them. There may even be an affiliate angle that could be worked.
Hey Kat, thanks for taking questions. I noticed you said the main aim of the program is to build a prototype or acquire a first customer. Our company is still working on our prototype, but we just got our first 3 paying beta customers last week. Is that a bit too late stage?
What do you mean? None of the extra charge is going to the workers. Amazon is simply taking a larger cut of every transaction. If anything, this may put downwards pressure on worker wages as employers pass on this new fee increase to their workers.
As a semi-regular user of MTurk, I find this new pricing excessive. Most products grow its revenues by acquiring more users instead of jacking up the pricing. I don't understand why Amazon needs MTurk bootstrap its new features growth. Surely, this is a relatively small team compared to Amazon's main products?
Well, to answer your question, Amazon must have figured out that researchers will pay quadruple or even orders of magnitude more for this service, because these costs are fairly transparent to people outside of science. They know a certain large segment of their customer base is willing to shoulder much higher fees for this.
