

Wayback Machine & What You Can Learn From It For Your Site / Startup  - betterlabs
http://blog.betterlabs.net/2009/02/05/wayback-machine-what-you-can-learn-from-it-for-your-site-startup/

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alabut
Not a lot new here but upvoting anyway just for this line:

"UX is something that always evolves and gets better and better with data,
user feedback and just availability of more time and is inherently an
iterative process, just as is the core product development process."

Seems obvious but definitely is something I run into often - treating
UX/Interaction Design as a standalone one-time thing you do, like taxes,
rather than an ongoing process.

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betterlabs
Thanks.

You are right that its not new per se, but I am not sure if founders are
leveraging all the knowledge one can gain from archives of successful sites to
learn from them. For example, I was looking at Etsy's homepage when they
launched and I think it was very clever for a community/marketplace site that
has the classic chicken and egg problem.

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alabut
I'm not sure they are either, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I also
lean towards the approach of learning from others and studying the ecology of
existing designs, but I think that betrays a designer's bias:) The YC ethic
seems to be more on the side of agile programming and prototyping in code and
it's an alternative approach that can also work well, given an extremely
capable set of coders.

By the way, I like your focus as a product incubator, that's a good
differentiator. I recently changed my linkedin title to "an interaction
designer specializing in early stage startups" and am slowly finding an
underground culture of bay area designers in the same scene - it's good to see
we're not all snapped up by ad agencies and big companies.

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betterlabs
Good point, I guess there's stuff you can learn from the past and the rest is
really dependent on your particular scenario where iterative development is
the best way to find a version that "works".

