Essential Features

Today I uninstalled Cal, a calendar app for my android phone. I liked Cal when I first installed it. It’s stylish, chic, and minimalist, as you can see from my below screenshots: The problem is, these three screens I’ve shown you? Are the only real screens in the app, save a settings screen. Do you see the problem yet? How about this: when I got to my hairdresser next week, I’m going to want to schedule another appointment, 3 months out. Continue reading

Teatime: A/B Testing

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: All the Lemon! by The Tea Dude. I know I usually recommend black teas, but I’ve got a sore throat this week, and lemon tisane hits the spot perfectly. Today’s Topic: Improving websites, with science! Continue reading

The Second Client Effect

I could have sworn there was an established name for this, but nobody I’ve asked can come up with an example, and my question on programmers.se got downvotes and close votes within an hour, so I guess I’ll just name it myself 🙂 We try to design sometimes for pluggability, and for the general case. We sit and we diagram and we think about broad use cases. And we’re often very wrong; that’s why YAGNI exists. Continue reading