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I intend this as constructive criticism, so I hope you understand that and take it as such: please hire a designer. Email is an app one stares at all day, it has to look good. Not fancy, but restful and pleasing to the eye with function dictating form.


I agree. It kinda looks like a HyperCard stack.


I promise I will hire a designer as hire #1, I'm aware my design is atrocious :D


You should be able to fix the readability of this without hiring a designer. Not that you shouldn't hire a designer, but you shouldn't wait to fix it before you hire one either. Since email is all about text, if it looks unreadable that's going to be a big turn-off. Read at least the next paragraph of my post!

To start, I would reduce the font sizes on your header-type items somewhat. It's clear that you're using large fonts and bold to emphasize key information (which is the right idea), but a heuristic I've found is that if you're using bold, your font doesn't need to be as big, or if you're using a large size, you may not need to be bold. When you do both, it's like an assault on the eyes, which you don't need here. Doing this alone would make your app like 75% better (note: I made that number up entirely and don't know very much about your app.)

Next, you could tone down the reds (I would change the hard red #F00 color to the softer pink-ish color, and then reduce the pinkish color further), and exchange the black on white for something else. For your icons, you could experiment with grays (I like to start with #333 and then go up or down), so they're less overwhelming.

Finally, add some labels for your icons. Remember how you made your fonts smaller before? Well that applies to these labels. They should be contrasty so you can read them, but otherwise it's fine if they're subtle.

A couple of minor points about your website: the proper name of your competitor is Gmail, not GMail. You should add more spacing between your icons and the text (it feels crowded currently.) Also, your circle arrow jobs are getting cut off at the bottom.

Finally part ii: don't forget to steal from others. Obviously I don't mean blatantly stealing a design, but just check out what other sites do. To do this effectively, you have to pick a particular thing and examine it closely. So for example, if you want to figure out how to do headers, go to other sites and see what they do to give emphasis to things without being overwhelming.


I actually like the red and black. It is powerful and direct, but probably won't appeal to all sensibilities. Good luck.


Yes, once-upon-a-time it was #F00, which felt like your eyeballs were getting torn from their sockets

Design is something I find quite difficult, and I usually keep my head in the backend

I really, really, really want to hire a designer so I can stay there, but being self-funded makes that impossible


It's not just the color scheme, in my opinion. I'm not a fan of the font, a lot of the icons don't carry semantic meaning (for me, YMMV), etc.


The font is Segoe UI, I did that screenshot before I bought Proxima Nova, so the font will become Proxima Nova (I may Instapaper this and give you a bazillion settings for it)

As for the icons, they are a very tricky subject, I intended to create symbols for major features such as Funnel and Triage and have common icons for everything else, but it seems I've failed there

Which icons don't you like?


Typekit gets you Proxima Nova as part of their package among others fonts. It's not bad, but for something like email, it may be helpful to use the standard stack of fonts.

My app sends emails (not a competitor). The interface uses proxima nova, but the email rendering is generally in an iframe with default sans-serif or serif font-faces.

If you use sans-serif as the first font-face that will default to Helvetica on Macs and Arial on Windows.


I generally don't like toolbars with lots of icons that don't have labels. Google's web properties have been moving in this direction and I find myself having to click buttons to figure out what they do.


How do you feel about hover-over Twipsy sort of things?

So when you hover over, a tooltip appears underneath the icon?


NO MAIL FOR YOU!


It's 15 hours now. They have some very irate customers.

Rackspace bought them a year ago and have been migrating accounts to their own servers, but this huge outage doesn't reflect well on Rackspace management either.


Already April 1st in the UK.


Today is the best day of the year.


Humans haven't stopped evolving in the 8000 years since grains were cultivated. It would seem logical that changes allowing grains to form an effective part of the diet would have occurred. Take the example of milk - humans in heavy cattle dependent parts of the world (ie: most everywhere except north east asia) produce enzymes allowing its digestion into adulthood. So can we now digest grain effectively?

For comparison: a mutation in one gene giving a 1% increase in survival chance will reach 50% saturation in a population in an average of 100 generations. For humans that's 2500 years or so.

What I'm saying is that if you don't have a genetic disposition to gluten intolerance you're likely to be perfectly ok with grain.


No need to guess, though. You can buy a cheap blood sugar monitor and run experiments on postprandial (after eating) blood glucose levels. Some people are more carbohydrate sensitive than others, and high postprandial blood sugar is associated with diabetes and heart disease. Here's a post from Dr. William Davis -- sorta my hero -- on the subject:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-on-blood-suga...

Furthermore, cutting out grains is an easy experiment you can try for a month or so at little effort/cost. If you're like most people, you'll drop 10-20lbs without effort, and your hunger will markedly subside.


That's an excellent point. In fact, the rate of human evolution is hundreds, possibly even a thousand times faster than it was in paleolithic times. Less than 15,000 years ago, nobody had lactose tolerance or blue eyes as an adult. Now, lactose tolerance is the norm and blue eyes are no longer uncommon.

http://www.dailytech.com/Life+in+the+Fastlane+Human+Evolutio...


IIRC lactose tolerance is only believed to have become endemic since about 8000 years ago, incidentally right around when agriculture hit the big time.

I wonder if the control of pasture lands necessitated the higher calorific quantity an animal provides when it is milked. Less herd land means a farmer would need to extract more calories per animal to survive. Similarly less migration also means less danger and higher populations, which again require more calories per animal to sustain.


That was exactly what I was thinking. Lactose tolerance is a very recent biological evolution, so much so that there can be marked differences within an individual population. For instance, there's 30% more lactose intolerance in the South of France than in the North of France.

It seems to be a trend that in the Medetarranian areas where fishing is more readily available throughout the year that lactose intolerance is higher. Despite a very short geographical distance, the percentage differences are huge. Sicilians for example have ~70% intolerance, Italy on average has ~35% tolerance, while just over the border in Switzerland you're down to 10%.

The differences can also be seen within a very, very short geographical range. For instance the Basques, a Spanish population historically centred around the Pyrenees (mountains) have the lowest intolerance in the world at 0.3%, while the non-basque Spanish have 15% tolerance, literally from not living on the herding steppes.

The latest period at which Native Americans could have migrated is at 12,000 years ago. In this period of time they have acquired zero lactose tolerance. However in the same time period, the Siberian peoples who the Native Americans came from became lactose tolerant. Assuming the highest rate posted for Russians their lactose intolerance is ~60%, however this is a dubious figure considering population exchanges between the Mongolian and Siberian populations (they're a political divide on a single Eurasian Steppe, it seems highly doubtful that genes would have stopped their spread for our political niceties 2,000 years in the future). Assuming the Mongolian percentages, Siberians likely now have a lactose intolerance rate in the single digits. This compares to the non-steppe population in 'Inner Mongolia' (China) who hit at about 87% intolerance.

With the vast divide between lactose tolerance on such an incredibly short scale of time and distances, I highly doubt we wouldn't have evolved some sort of gluten tolerance, especially considering the vastly higher percentages of lactose intolerance compared to gluten intolerance.

Let's put it this way, unless you're a Spanish Basque, your greatest concern for adverse health effects in a sustainable diet is dairy. The Dutch, Swedes and Mongolians of the Steppe are the next to be concerned. Anyone else, be concerned when your doctor diagnoses you, because otherwise you're as dumb as a dog chasing its tail.


Huh! 37Signals has all this other stuff that I never scrolled down to before. Interesting.


Perhaps I'm missing the concept of "the fold" the author is trying to get across, but I think 37Signals is a really good example of putting things _above the fold. Looking at their site they even have a line at the fold separating the two sections. I think they've done used the concept of "the fold" really well, don't get me wrong, but it's absolutely there.

The black section at the bottom I always just assumed was a footer, not a call to action, and honestly never read that before.

Ironically it seems to me the news sites seem to have done away with the concept of the fold the best. http://www.bbc.co.uk/, http://www.nytimes.com/, http://seattletimes.com


I don't quite get what you mean in your last sentence - the fold is a perception of the viewer not of the content creator. These 3 sites haven't done away with the concept they've simply extended their handling in the paper versions attacking the metaphor in the same way as the original problem. Just like they put tag lines, teasers, introductions all with page numbers on actual newspapers they put short snippets on their front pages on the web.

Care to elaborate?


I had posted a comment on that there iceberrrrg site regarding how I believe his analysis and 37signal example was incorrect. Low and behold my comment did not get approved.

I'm still sticking to my guns that 37signals heavily implemented tactics for optimizing click-throughs and conversion ratios based on their bread and butter services being listed with bright and bold colors ABOVE THE FOLD.

On that note, it's slightly disheartening that this article is generating such attention on HN.


Totally agree.

He uses a tactic of providing a teaser and little textual content above the fold in order to lead one to scroll down. The article author uses the fold in a comical sort of way with reference to the iceberg. Nice idea though.


QED?


Free music is infeasible? Tell that to people jamming with their friends, or buskers, or radio.

Is it feasible for free music to make big money for the majors? Different question, but we know the answer: "who cares?"


Free music is infeasible? Tell that to people jamming with their friends

Yes, absolutely. Would be nice if more people made their own music.


I get the impression that moving away from COBOL, "Big Iron", and such dinosaurs has, after the initial wrench, made companies more productive. All of which makes me wonder what part the army of salesmen that go with these things play in their continued existence. (And the executive-ego-stroke of having an impressive room dominated by a bond-villianesque monolith.)


In my experience, the reasons are mostly just because it's been the standard for so long at said shop.

Most people using mainframes don't make money off of their IT department, their programmers are expensive and don't produce profits. Investing in a large change from "what works and has a fixed cost" to something new and possibly troublesome or more expensive (initial cost) just isn't a priority for them.

Not to mention the retraining you'd have to do. A lot of these programmers are either old and unwilling to learn, or just uninterested in rocking the boat. So is it worth it to have to fire people or get subpar code, or just stick with what's working that keeps you generating a profit and keeps your current programmers job security?


To all the commenters here saying "it's not a bug it's a feature":

Ok, but how did the other michael sign up with the non-period name? That's the bug, surely?


He probably didn't. He probably meant @ymail, or firstlast3@gmail or some other permutation.

At least, that's been the case for most of the misdirected email I've received.


There can be very good reasons for "punishing" them. The development time required to cater to IE6's idiosyncrasies may simply not be justified if the site's target market is not business or people during work hours. Providing a substandard experience is often worse than no experience (look at it later when you're not at work).

Then there's the activism angle - only by applying pressure, one site at a time, can the IE curse be gradually eliminated. The total wasted man-hours catering to its quirks is exceeded only by the hours wasted producing weapons and religion. sigh


Kissinger, Begin, and Sadat all won it in the 70s. It's had zero credibility since then.

Which is a pity, because the clear purpose is to encourage rather than necessarily always to reward, and Obama's intentions definitely seem to be good.


Arafat was another strange choice.


Not to mention Al Gore; that one will look really stupid RSN, given how people are starting to understand what a hoax "global warming" is.


I am not certain if you are being sarcastic here.

I very much doubt global warming is a hoax. A majority of scientists in climatology and related fields seem to believe in global warming (though there is disagreement over many of the details, most significantly the degree and that one can vary widely.) Even if they have gotten it wrong, which is a real possibility, I very much doubt that anyone did it with intention to deceive or create a hoax.

Note that I am not making any statements one way or another about "An Inconvenient Truth" or Al Gore or his receipt of the nobel prize. What I am saying is that from my layman's perspective it seems that there is at least some truth to global warming and that even if it is indeed not true then that would be a scientific error, not a hoax.


I'd say people are finally starting to understand that global warming is not a hoax.


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