I recently flew what may be one of my final Southwest trips ever. This is crazy to say, since Southwest has been my default airline since I was a kid. (My family used to fly them often, and that loyalty carried over to my adulthood.) Back in the 2000s, Southwest hedged fuel costs and locked in great deals before fuel prices shot up. So between their legendary service and low fares, there was no…
TL;DR: DNSimple eliminated our "legacy plan" and tried to increase our annual spend from $810 (plus domain registration fees) to $4,000 (plus domain registration fees). Over ten years ago, I started using DNSimple's API to register domains for my side project, FolioHD (an online portfolio service). At the time, it cost $10 for a .com domain along with a monthly reseller fee of $50. Recently I got…
One of the things I love about working at PostHog is that one of our core values is Bias for impact . If you want to make a change to posthog.com , there's no linear process you have to follow. You don't need approval from a specific person. Anyone can see your proposed changes and merge them at anytime. It's a great example of this core value in action. As a designer, I want to keep the bar high…
Designers always want to leave their mark. I get it. You want to have something to be remembered by. This is no different within Google. Android has been significantly improved in recent years. It's finally on par with iOS design. (And it only took a decade and a half!) But there's a point where designers start redesigning things that weren't broken, and we've hit that point. Moreso, they're…
Update: After some retweets about this issue, my domain is finally unblocked. (More details at the end of this post.) Facebook censorship has effectively barred my business from their platform and is materially impacting the livelihood of my customers. For the past decade, I’ve run an online portfolio business on the side called FolioHD . (You get a subdomain on the platform to host your…
App designers are always trying to stay on-trend. The problem is that sometimes these trends tend to take design backwards from a usability perspective. The last horrible design trend (2013) A few years back when Apple decided to change iOS icons from filled in to outlined (in iOS 7), many believed this to be a step in the wrong direction, as outlined icons increase cognitive load. The image and…
The vast majority of the hip, cool Silicon Valley-based startups have products that work decently well. The one outlier in this category is Postmates. I have no idea what they're doing over there, but every time I try to use it - between errors, poor UX decisions and outright bugs - the whole experience is a disaster. And this is from a company that has raised over $326 million! So in an effort to…
I spend a lot of time ranting about businesses that treat customers poorly. I have a rule on Yelp that I have to post more positive reviews than negative, and while this isn't Yelp, I figured it was time to highlight someone doing something right. So I was in Jersey City, NJ - just across the water from Manhattan, with the French Bulldog in tow. Since I didn't exactly want to leave her for more…
TL;DR: Did you know you can't plug a Pixel phone into a TV to mirror your screen? Google purposely left this feature out because they want you to buy a Chromecast and have decided that wireless is the future, and to not build for the thousands of edge cases in the meantime. Silicon Valley decides how we use technology. Since they make the products we all use, they have the ultimate say about how…
When companies produce redesigns, the intention is usually to make things easier to use, make features more discoverable, and often to provide a visual refresh. As we all know, people don’t like change, so usually their is some level of revolt. This revolt usually subsides over the course of weeks or months and everyone moves on. But not always... Stripe recently released an update of their…
May 2010 in Memphis, TN: I open the door to my downtown hotel room. It smells a bit musty, the floors a bit creaky, and the noise from the street is surprisingly audible for a hotel of this rating. I reach for a complimentary water bottle to discover that the bottle's security seal had already been broken, indicating the bottle was already consumed and then refilled. All this comes after my first…
I'm deeply disappointed at the response that the Presidential election has evoked from my industry. Today, the CEO of a food delivery service, Grubhub, wrote a letter to his employees that essentially paired Trump voters with "hateful politics" and, while he didn't directly say it, inferred that if you support Trump, you should resign. Everyone has a right to their own opinions, but in the same…
In recent years (really, the post-Steve Jobs era), the designers on iOS have become lax. In an effort to add new features or "improve" design, they have crippled usability and crammed buttons into places that shouldn't even be places. And without someone like Steve Jobs to send them back to the drawing board, these train wrecks now make it into production. A few examples: "Back to App" button When…
I just read this headline: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth source Surprised? I sure hope not. It continues to astound me that websites with a large user base and trajectory seem to be a good enough reason to go public. Many of these sites are the fad of the month but happen to catch mainstream hype at just the right time. Zynga, anyone? Let me say this: Because you…
Dear Flightcar, I tried. I really tried. When I found out about you, I was stoked. "Finally!" I thought, "A company that's going to disrupt the miserable car rental business! " And in theory, the concept is great. The only problem: The car rental business is a customer service-intense industry. Translation: your customer support has to be on point. Unfortunately, the customer support department at…
Student Loan Debt I often sit in coffee shops where I overhear conversations about college, finals and financial aid. And we all know the end result: tens, if not over a hundred thousand in student loans. And for what? Let's take a look at the typical careers for the first 10 years after graduating college: Retail clerks. Baristas. Receptionists. Independent creatives (we'll visit this one later).…
The revolutionary thing about the internet is that it's "always on". Do some shopping at midnight in your PJ's? Yep. Watch a movie at 3 AM from bed? Absolutely. Which is why I was astonished to discover a website that has "normal business hours" and actually closes at night. Of course it would be a government website, namely the Social Security Administration. How did I discover this? I recently…
In this episode of "the life of a business owner..." People say the darndest things when writing in to customer support. Here's a recent example sent in to FolioHD . "My service is still not working. My business depends on the reliability of this website and if this can't be fixed I'll have to switch providers immediately. " Do customers think support people are more inclined to respond faster if…
It was announced today that illegal immigrants will now be eligible to receive back tax refunds even though they've never actually paid taxes. Today I went to pick up a prescription that cost me over $100 because my new Obamacare insurance doesn't cover it. My old insurance was 1/4 the cost and covered everything. I'm working on filing my taxes and am astounded at the amount of money I'm handing…
Typically when we buy something, we're accustomed to paying the listed price, plus a mandated tax on the item. But recently we've become accustomed to seeing additional fees on purchases that aren't listed in the purchase price. This is already common practice for things like utility bills, cell phone bills, and car rentals. But over the past decade, this practice has extended to the internet in…
TL;DR: This post is an incredibly petty example of how Lexus improved an already perfectly positioned parking brake. Seriously. "Don’t give people what they want; give them what they need." - Joss Whedon We've all heard this quote a thousand times; sometimes I use it to my advantage in my design work. It's easy to discount others opinions when you think what you've done is superior. But this post…
In recent years, technology has solved most of the pain points of travel and logistics. Uber now delivers a car to you in just minutes with the press of a button. Waze gets you around traffic. Hotwire's app and Hotel Tonight let you book a same-day hotel with a couple taps. But have you tried renting a car lately? If traditional car rental companies have been consistent in one area, it's making…
FolioHD went down this week due to some server problems. I happened to be in Paris, approximately 5,642 miles away from where the servers reside in Los Angeles. This tends to be a problem when you are physically nowhere near the data center and when you can't fix things remotely. The remaining two days of my vacation were spent on spotty, unreliable wifi, emailing with customers and working with…
As a business owner, I cannot count the number of times I am solicited for products or services, or by recruiters looking to work with us. Over time, you learn to tune them out just like we all do with junk mail. But last week at Preact, something far different happened - far superior to cold calls and cold emails. We received a packet on our doorstep from a private banker at Wells Fargo. This was…
Dirty political tricks are finally starting to affect normal people, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Because Republicans won't pass a bill to fund the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration decided to " make life as difficult for people as we can " and has barricaded public monuments , national parks, views of Mount Rushmore (you can't even pull over to the side of the road to take…
I tend to stay away from religion and politics here, but this is something that's been on my mind lately and I wanted to share it. Recently I ran into my former (now-retired) voice teacher from high school, Bob, at a coffee shop. I was unaware in high school, but as we chatted, it became clear to me that he is a hardcore democrat. We began talking politics, as I was curious as to why he felt the…
This post is about failed relationships, and it's something that is atypical for me to write about for a couple reasons: I'm a guy and guys don't typically talk about relationships, especially in a public forum. It highlights one of my failures/vulnerabilities and the internet is typically a place where people only put their best foot forward (myself included). I've been through a couple…
Car dealerships. What comes to mind when you hear that phrase? To me, I think of pesky salesmen, cheap linoleum flooring, fluorescent lighting, and the smell of rubber. And everybody has a story about the painful process of buying a car. I can't imagine being the only person to have the same feelings to the typical car dealerships as I do. That's part of the reason why I was so confused when…
It disgusts me how much the media demonizes the wealth of successful people. Phil Mickelson got flak this week for saying new federal and state tax rates would prevent him from joining in on a deal to be part of the San Diego Padres new ownership group. He explained the new tax code would force him to make "drastic changes". On Sunday, Mickelson explained, "If you add up all the federal and you…
TL;DR: The startup industry largely supports Obama who wants to increase taxes on the wealthy. Raising taxes on the wealthy directly affects the amount of capital available to entrepreneurs because when investors pay more in taxes, they have less money to invest in new startups. The internet startup "industry" is built off the fact that there are investors who are willing to write checks to…