{18} Spacing, Bugs & Animated Math
{18} Spacing, Bugs & Animated Math
Featuring Utsav Khokhanasiya, Stellate, Kuba, Rodrigo 'Rolo' Ortiz, and Grant Sanderson
Design: Space
Utsav Khokhanasiya
I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. How you visually cluster elements can help communicate relationships and make interfaces easier to parse at a glance. Here are two mistakes I see all the time:
People believe “wasted space is a missed opportunity”. So they close down all the gaps and pack as much information into the interface as possible. These interfaces tend to be very confusing. The lack of visual relationships removes context and makes every piece of info feel siloed and random.
Space is treated purely as a visual tool to make a design look nice. It’s not uncommon to see two related elements on opposite sides of the UI map. You can often avoid this by starting with a low-fi wireframe to map the layout. This helps keep things organized as you add elements to the design.
Development: Interviewing Guillermo Rauch
Stellate
Great overall interview. The first question really snatched my attention. It was essentially, “How do you find and empower undiscovered talent?”. Guillermo’s response was spot on and reminded me of a hiring discussion I had with the dev team of Twitch as they scaled up in the early days.
Hiring is a community-building problem. Taking a reactive approach and relying on a recruiter to fill a critical position of need is a losing battle. It’s much better to get ahead of the game and invest in community building. Then hire leaders in your community and give them autonomy. It’s a simple approach, but it resonates with me.
Disclaimer: The community approach isn’t a plug-and-play solution. A lot of viable companies working on “boring” solutions might not as successful at community building. But for companies like Vercel and Twitch, it works well.
Marketing: Content Marketing
Kuba
I agree with this 98% of the time. Low-effort initiatives rarely work. When they do, it’s often a campaign hitting the lotto.
I’m not against placing low-effort bets, but you’ve got to build a content foundation. Here are a few considerations:
What are your goals? Without a north star, it’s easy to spin your wheels.
What is your voice? Your words are part of your brand. Having some form of a style guide can be useful.
Where does your content live? I think it’s a bad idea to just shove everything into a blog and call it a day. There are so many social networks and publishing platforms. Bring your content to your audience, don’t force your audience to come to you.
When does your content live? Releasing the right message at the right time can make all the difference. Maybe a conference is coming up, and you can anticipate and lead the resulting conversations.
On top of that, planning and coordination will only get you so far. You’ve still got to put in the effort to refine your words and put out a message people want to read.
Feedback: Collecting Bug Reports
Rodrigo 'Rolo' Ortiz
Proximity is context (as noted in design section 👆). So it drives me crazy when apps think getting feedback and talking to users equals an NPS survey that asks “How likely would you be to recommend us to a friend?”. An NPS score is a non-actionable metric that tells you nothing about what your users are trying to accomplish or the challenges they face.
That’s why I’m really excited to see Rodrigo launch an alternative solution. Feedbug is a tool that will allow users to click on elements of your app and leave in-line feedback. This should reduce the barrier to leave meaningful feedback and give dev teams enough context to figure out what is going on and take action.
The challenge I see with Feedbug is figuring out how to engage users to leave feedback when they become frustrated. It looks like the beta solution is to have a floating button in the bottom corner. Clicking it triggers a feedback interface to click on an element and drop a comment. But that interaction might not be intuitive to an angry user trying to fill out a form.
Here are 2 potential ways to engage users:
Incentivize feedback - The feedback button could say something like “Share your feedback and earn a free month”. Incentives might be tempting but I suspect people would leave a lot of meaningless comments just to redeem rewards.
Timely prompts - It could be much better to detect a frustrating user experience and show a prompt saying something like “Hold your horses cowboy! What’s the problem?”.
Detecting a frustrating experience can be a rabbit hole. I’d start with a rage click trigger. If a user rapidly clicks an interface, something is likely wrong. Here is a chunk of code that could help detect rage clicks.
Wildcard: Animated Math
Grant Sanderson
Now for animated math by Grant Sanderson. Don’t panic, math is beautiful.
I often find math expressions to be a meaningless jumble of numbers and symbols. I use math all the time while writing code. Creating generative art is one of the most satisfying things I do with code. Making code art requires combining various branches of math. But I lack some of the vocabulary and foundation to really think in mathematic notation.
Grant bridges the gap between math and computer science. His videos are never a waste of time. This explanation of convolution helps visualize working with probabilities, moving averages, image processing, and even optimizing complex algorithms (FFT, Fast Fourier transform). Enjoy!