Books I am discarding

I have to clean my house today. I went thru my bookshelf and found all the books I don't realistically need. I love my books, but honestly, when am I ever going to read Portrait as a Young Man? I tried burning it in 2001. That copy of the Cosmic Code? I had it since I was 14. I loved it then, but I am not about to create an entire site on it.

Some are more interesting but I will never find the time. Like Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism.



Sigh. Au revoir, Zola.

Strange find from my Thucydides

I found these with the copy of History of Peloponnesian War I had. I didn't know I was such a big fan.

 

 

How did MySpace, with a smart team of people, do such a BAD UI/UX job with the new design? - @Quora

Answer edited by Andrew Chen.

...he answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetizat, and the redesign reflected that.

First off- let meHowever, However the new MySpace is s: :

When the team was woin, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So tfeed newsfeed to generate short-te. This kind of thing happens all the time.

However, when .

When you are asking what ... (view context)

The answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetization ahead of user experience due to its failing business fundamentals, and the redesign reflected that.

First off- let me state that I think the new MySpace is actually better than the old one. However, However the new MySpace is still not good enough, obviously, to turn around the product.

I recently spoke to an interaction designer who worked on the new MySpace, who told me an anecdote that blew my mind: :

When the team was working on the new feed at the heart of MySpace, the interaction designers wanted to make bigger images so that it'd be easy to see what users' friends were doing. Similarly, they wanted to make the feed more easily scannable and have more content per page on the feed. Basically, to turn the feed into a modern implementation the way Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and many others have set up.

However, they were aware that if they did this, then users would be less likely to click through to the images and thus would decrease pageviews. Given MySpace's declining revenues, the interaction designers there were asked to actively design in, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So they added smaller images than they thought optimal, and fewer images per page than they thought optimal, just so that they could generate more pageviews. Basically they were now designing a worse feed newsfeed to generate short-term revenue.

As I understand, this happened systematically within the product which led to many compromises in the user experience, and the business needs won every time. This kind of thing happens all the time.

However, when .

When you are asking what ought to be the strongest user advocates at the company to design for the business goals as a priority, you do not end up with an inspired product experience.

You have to prioritize having a great product experience to end up with a great product experience- it doesn't happen by accident.

Anyway, the site is still huge and influential in many ways, so let's hope the team there figures it out and there's a resurgence in the future.

#2415931 • Mar 04, 2011 12:26 AM

via quora.com

Great insight on UX and how good ones (and bad ones) are made by skilled people.
Found via HNews.

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Steven Hyden on Grunge Music and Nostalgia - @AttemptMustache @The_AV_Club

Now is a good time to finally address an issue that’s been hovering in the background of this series from the beginning: the distinction between “cool” ’90s rock and “uncool” ’90s rock. I’ve made an effort to focus on some of the era’s biggest names and most commercially successful rock bands because 1) those are the bands I liked at the time; 2) those are the bands that millions of other people liked at the time; and 3) I find it strange that many people, including myself, don’t seem to remember it that way.

When I look back to my music-listening habits in 1995, I tend to overlook all the time I spent listening to Throwing Copper and instead think only about how I obsessed over GBV’s Alien Lanes, which I bought after reading a glowing four-star review in Rolling Stone. That summer, I tried to make heads or tails of a record that boasted 28 absentmindedly recorded songs in just 41 minutes. I was lost until I realized that the whole record was basically like the second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which stitched a series of melodic fragments into an extended suite. Just like that, Alien Lanes made sense, and GBV quickly became one of my favorite bands. In hindsight, Live seems likes a footnote, despite selling millions of records and playing 25,000-seat amphitheaters in its heyday, while Guided By Voices appears a lot bigger and more important today even if it reached only a fraction of Live’s audience in the ’90s.

via avclub.com

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