SXSW is a massive interactive/music/film conference in Austin Texas and I’ll be there babysitting the other lads from Shopify: Harley, Daniel, Cody, Tobi, Toby and the other Mark.
I’m already meeting up with a few awesome chaps and I can’t wait to see how SXSW compares with Future of Web Design (FOWD) and Future of Web Apps (FOWA).
One of my favorite interface principles is Aza Raskin’s never use a warning when you meant undo. Take a gander at his full article which eloquently argues for the demise of the warning dialogues that plagues almost all user interfaces.
Let me give an example using the Shopify interface: When we delete a product collection in Shopify this is what we get:
This interface could improve by ditching the maladroit dialog box and give the user the option to revert their changes.
2 more violators of the undo principle include: Grooveshark and Google Mail…
Grooveshark: When you are listening to music and close your tab in Safari you get a message confirming you want to leave the page. Why doesn’t Grooveshark just remember what I was last listening to? Worse case scenario is the user accidently closes the window and just goes back to Grooveshark and continues listening to whatever they listened to last.
Gmail: When you start writing a message and leave the page without sending it Google gives you the beautifully written message pictured below. I know Gmail autosaves my drafts and I’m positive I didn’t send the message because I didn’t click send, so why does this dialog exist?
A few notes on how I feel about salaries at this young age:
Salary is relative. When I get a raise I think to myself “Wow, this is incredible amount of money for my age”. Appallingly, 4 months down the road I think to myself “I probably should be making a little more money”. I’m positive if you give me $200,000 after a few quarters I’ll begin to think that I should be entitled to a raise whether I deserve it or not.
Salary is secondary. The monetary value of a salary increase is great, but what really makes me happy is when the executives sit me down and say how impressed they are. I leave the room smitten with pride over their comments, not their financial gestures. Maslow is right.
Salary can demotivate . One company I worked for shared a pdf with guidelines on how much everyone should be getting paid. Even though these were just “guidelines”, I cannot express how disappointed I was to learn that there is a salary “ceiling”. I voiced my discontent to one of the execs and he iterated the fact they were guidelines and in no way is there a limit on how much I can earn. Despite the reassurance, I still became paranoid that the amount of subsequent salary increases would be a reflection of the guidelines and not my value to the company.