New York vs. Silicon Valley Style · 20 January, 03:40 PM
via Jon Gruber, Tumblr vs. Posterous, or “New York vs. Silicon Valley style”. It’s mostly an analysis of each site’s signup process, but there’s a larger point that the signup process should just get out of the way, particularly for a service that claims to just get out of the way.
since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. UI/UX design. Social design. Business model design as well…But you can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design.
I think that’s true. Tim Bray made the same point about search today, basically that he likes Bing for aesthetic reasons and that Bing is “the future”. I don’t know, old habits die hard. Maybe it’s not true for search. But my sense is that Gobry’s point is valid. If you have to make people register, make it easy. Wizards suck. Checklists suck. Seriously, if I need a roadmap to sign up, I’m not going to stick with it.
Of course, if Silicon Valley or NYC don’t float your boat, there’s always the New Jersey style. Is there still space for evolutionary design? Do first impressions mean so much?
— Gordon Weakliem
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