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Aug 2 2011

Keep me signed in for 2 weeks...

Media_https3amazonaws_piwap

One of answers seems to make sense:

The 2 weeks duration comes from the Fortnight unit, which is some kind of old english for 2 weeks.

A single Fortnight is 1209600 seconds, or 1209600000 millisecond, which was a technical limit in some older systems.

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Oct 20 2010

2 Tools I Enjoy Making Wireframes

After dozens of wireframed projects I found myself using only 2 tools, that I would like to share with you.

Tool number 1: Pencil Project http://pencil.evolus.vn/

http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Handlers/PictureHandler.ashx?ResourceId=4be6736...

The only one reason why I put it as number 1, because it is free. Being free is a powerful argument, sometimes a deal breaker.

There are many people who complain about it, but it worked fine for me for a while. Yes, it is buggy, sometimes crashes (never lost any data though) and is not the nicest looking thing out there, but it does its job well. Pencil doesn’t have a native wrapper for Mac, yet, and you have to open it from the Firefox (which I am not using at all).

Tool number 2: Balsamiq Mockups http://balsamiq.com/

Media_httpbalsamiqcom_nkgjc

Well, they don’t deserve to my number 2, actually, because they are almost perfect. I hate Adobe Air wrap-up though, but it’s manageable. Everything else makes it an absolute winner. You will never buy anything better for $79, speaking about mockup editors and wireframing tools. (People who know me, know that I am really conservative about spending money for software, and I am very picky about whom to pay.)

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Jun 16 2010

Sign Up Forms Must Die

I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

An old (2008), but still actual post by Luke Wroblewski about new look at the sign up forms (still a way to go in 2010). He also has a section on gradual engagement solution, which implementation showed nice results in many companies (ie. Twitter).

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Apr 23 2010

Spatial Thinking

Most humans are used to spatial thinking. Even if - like mine - your desk is a huge mess, you can probably find your stuff pretty quickly because you just know where you put it. Each thing on your desk has a fixed place in space which does not change on its own. If you put something somewhere, it’ll still be there the next day, and you’ll know where you can find it.

My Desk (Partial Shot)

When designing user interfaces, it’s important to keep people’s ability for spatial thinking in mind. People can easily find things based on position. If a human puts something somewhere, he’ll probably be able to find it again if the user interface doesn’t move it. If possible, the user interface should always display things where the user put them, and allow for spatial organization.

This is one of the rare occasions when I see my thoughts materialized and verbalized by someone else, just like they need to be.

Good post about what you see daily on your iPhone and why is it so.

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Feb 25 2010

"Mad Libs" format for registration forms

Jeremy built the form to work as you'd expect. You can tab between the "blanks" just the way you tab between standard Web form input fields. You can click on any "blank" to start entering text. The password "blank" masks any characters you enter just like a standard password input, and the whole form manages errors if you answer any questions incorrectly. In other words, it works like a standard Web form but it looks quite different. The presentation is inviting and fun, which is quite unlike a standard Web form.

Narrative "Mad Libs" format for signup forms was used in the several A/B tests and *actually* increased conversion by 25-40%.

I find it very cool. What do you think?

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Feb 25 2010

MySpace product document leaked

On Tuesday we posted an internal MySpace product document presenting detailed recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform. Included in that post was an embed of the document hosted on Scribd. MySpace has chosen to send a DMCA notice to Scribd to have that document removed, and Scribd complied.

So we’re putting it on our own servers. You can download it in all its glory here.

If you want to fight this, MySpace, you have to come through our lawyers.

MySpace is get to fight it back, by the way. I don't think it's going to happen though. :)

Here is the direct link:

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/apps-expert-review-2a.pdf

(Plenty of illustrations with comments.)

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About Olexandr Prokhorenko

My name is Olexandr Prokhorenko. I am passionate about building products that users *love*.

My LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/white.


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