Notes by Philip Dhingra
User-Experience

Craigslist is a superior job board because its only master is simplicity. By spending less time catering to employers and job-seekers, it ends up being cherished by both

When looking for jobs on craigslist, you receive more personal responses, as opposed to automated or mass emails that come from other large job sites like Elance or Monster. Craigslist's competitors provide all sorts of tools to help advertisers re-post ads and to help job-hunters to apply in bulk. On craigslist, there are no templates. There is no "apply to all" or "post to all" buttons. Everything is a one-shot event. One job post has one fee. And if the post or email gets buried over time by the competition, so be it. There's no gaming it, so the results are more genuine and personal, which benefits everyone.

# design technology ux

Email is a to-do list controlled by others

# self-improvement ux

The emphasis on content in responsive design has turned the art of making web pages from the "anything goes" of Geocities back into the walled garden of AOL

The title "web designer" used to be cutting edge and creative but now (2015) it has become a paint-by-numbers routine. Most websites follow a few basic templates. Everything is simply a matter of filling in the navigation here, a title bar there, and so-on. This is a result of the web becoming more mobile-centric. There's simply only a handful of ways to build a responsive site, one that collapses correctly into a mobile-appropriate way. Thus the web is becoming more consistent, and potentially more content-focused.

# design technology ux

The native vs. web app debate would be moot if browser cookies and caches truly kept us signed on with offline surfing

Native apps are superior to web apps in essentially two ways that a browser can fix very cheaply: consistent caching rules, and naturally permanent cookies. The promise of a browser cache doesn't seem real, as it's impossible to surf your browser history without an Internet connection. Even though many users are on broadband, it would seem like there's still an incentive to serve assets from a cache as often as possible, so as to keep web pages load times down.

The promise of browser cookies also doesn't seem real, as it's impossible to go a day of surfing the web without having to log into a site again. This is the most bizarre of all patterns, because login failures equal lost business. But stricter caching, and cookies that are more obviously permanent would be all it would take to give a native app experience to web. After all, isn't the main benefit of native apps that the UI works offline and you don't have to log in every time?

# design technology ux
4 entries