Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shagie 750 days ago
There's good reason to use it for a beta build (or an alpha) - it changes the type of feedback you get.

While my google-fu is failing me as I write this, there was a blog post I read long ago about a making things look not done (I want to say it was in the context of an AWT look and feel). Related: xkcd-style Plots https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11350/xkcd-s... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597977 ) and https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_xkcd_style_graph...

If the product looks done then the feedback you will get assumes that it is done.

I made the mistake of using a nice looking header (it looked better than the existing ones that were used which were stretched gifs and I had a CSS gradient) while working on the innards of some JavaScript. While I was trying to get feedback on the "is this workflow the right sequence of pages? Are these the UI elements that need to be on the page for this functionality? For that matter, am I missing some functionality?" .... and I got feedback about the color blue and if it should go from dark to light or light to dark in the gradient.

...

And with some digging I remembered the look and feel - https://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net

Which has the links to the blog post:

Don't make the Demo look Done - https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/...

1 comments

Check out Bill Buxton's work, he wrote a lot about this: https://www.billbuxton.com/