Agreed. I noticed that as well since I also follow Mika McKinnon. However, now I just noticed something strange. I'm blocked by Emily Lakdawalla? Since I never speak to people on Twitter, I must follow somebody which qualifies me for a block list. I really dislike that concept.
The LCARS display has a special place in my family. A few years back, my wife had a follow-up interview that landed on Halloween at Ubisoft. She was informed, "Don't be surprised if people are in costume and you should consider it too, if you feel so inclined."
She slapped on a TNG Combadge and re-designed her resume to look like a LCARS display and said, "Hey, it worked for their production when they were in a pinch." She accepted an offer a few days later.
Not to sound too negative, but I kind of feel like the timing of this story is suspect. It seems to be on the heels of numerous articles [1][2][3] from Pixar talking about their new character, which is an octopus, escaping and rescuing Dory the fish.
FWIW, I am a huge fan of cephalopods and have a large octopus tattoo enshrining my admiration for the animal. They certainly are highly intelligent, so the story isn't impossible.
But the story doesn't even mention Pixar or Finding Dory? Is this some sort of new ultra low-frequency subliminal advertising? Or are you just being a little paranoid? You're the one who brought it up, maybe you're the one working for Pixar.
What was that axiom that Red Auerbach was attributed with? "You can't teach height." Ricky demonstrated he was hungry to learn and succeed at a very early age, a quality that will always bring some level of success through life: "I had to bring my dad to the office the next day and told him to pretend to say some words in Mandarin while I just demanded that I get put in an honors-level English class."
How do you identify those who are underprivileged, but carry that quality too? It can be very difficult to identify.
I was annoyed when this launched because it was no longer easy to get to the English language version of Al Jazeera even if you wanted to, unless you took steps to change your location.
Actually, in the US when they put up the aljazeera/america site they started automatically routing me away from aljazeera/english. I pointed this out via email, and said I preferred the English version (Europe slant vs American) and they put a link at the bottom of the page to allow people to choose the English site. So try them- they are (were? it was a while back) very responsive.
It's a running joke. Included on some of their slides and webpages is the disclaimer:
"This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters. Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags "
I think the OpenBSD people started doing this after the CERN presentation on the Higgs boson that also used Comic Sans. By making it slightly harder to read and therefore more difficult to scan diagonally, it increases the attention the reader gives to the text.
And yet they could have improved readability by simply using png instead of jpg. This isn't a 'hipster' thing, it's a 'be thoughtful of your users' thing.
I can understand why you're being downvoted, but I also understand the sentiment. There needs to be a way to tell the OS "I never want to see Comic Sans again".
with that font and words like seperation, priviledge .... and the navigation! (would it have killed you to add just a tiny bit of javascript for a right and left arrow, or space, or page-down or...something) - it just comes off as just too unpolished. I rarely complain about form over substance but I didn't make it all the way through.
The OpenBSD folks are notorious for presenting extremely basic formatting on their sites, articles, presentations, etc. I think the Comic Sans is most likely a troll of other websites where the formatting, UI, etc, look like they got more polish than the content itself.
Move your mouse button, and keep clicking. Not really the biggest deal. If not having a JS-based presentation kept you from reading all the way through, you're probably the person who will never use tame() anyways, so... it is what it is. :P
It's likely I'll use tame() at some point, and I found the presentation annoying enough to read that I went to google and searched for information about it in an easier to digest format. Still though, point proved: if content is interesting enough, poor presentation won't entirely turn people off from learning about it.
No, I read through until I saw "priviledge" two or three times; along with "seperate" it was too much. It's 2015, a spell-check is not beyond anyone's editor.
"I think the Comic Sans is most likely a troll of other websites where the formatting, UI, etc, look like they got more polish than the content itself."
This issue has come up multiple times. At this point they're only trolling their own users.
Perhaps the author is dyslexic, and wanted an easy to read font? As far as I know, Comic Sans is the only font that is easy to read for dyslexic folk that works in about every graphical web browser.
I'm dyslexic and disagree with the assessment that Comic Sans is easier to read. I stopped after the first third slide because I couldn't read it without reading each line multiple times, assuming that was indeed comic sans.
I still do not understand the popularity of this approach. It seems to crazy increase bounce rates. You would think that negative user behavior would already make these undesirable without Google being explicit?
Fair enough. That was just the first google result I clumsily found. However, the web department at my company found that an email signup interstitial 30 seconds after first page load increased our email signups by about 4x, without a noticeable impact on our profit margins.
As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials:
1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason.
2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates reducing activation rates (bounce rates aren't as high as you might think btw in certain cases) but at the end of the day, a 1% increase in repeat purchase rate (or insert other retention metric here) will have a much much more significant impact than a 1% increase in activation.
It only works for certain scenarios and cases, but at the end of the day, there's significant data to show that they work.
One unfortunate thing that imo is increasing the value of app installs (and therefore how much "collateral damage" in bounce rates is worth it) is that companies are starting to use them as a push ad platforms. Once your app's on the phone, you can push notifications whenever you want, not only when the user is actively using the app. While with a mobile website, once they navigate away from the site you can't push ads until the next time they visit.
The Hotwire Android app was the first one I noticed doing this, raising notifications unrelated to actual use of the app (e.g. for bookings). If they have a general promotion, like "fall sale" or something, they push a notification to a targeted subset of users. In their case there isn't even an option in the app settings to opt out of the notification spam. Yelp was the second app I found doing this, but they at least have an opt-out in their settings menu. For apps that don't, you can entirely revoke their notification privileges in the central Android settings, but I doubt the average user knows how to do that.
My dislike for playing whack-a-mole with this kind of nonsense is why I don't install apps anymore (outside a few trusted exceptions, like Wikipedia's app), and just use mobile websites.
> 1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience.
Don't give a fuck. If I wanted your shitty app, I would have gone to the Play store and installed it. If I want to go to your website, then I want to fucking go to your website. Don't be a bag of rancid dicks and redirect me.
I generally agree with these points. We ended up with an interstitial the same way I hope most everyone else did: we A/B tested it, and the results were clearly positive on engagement and purchase.
We could choose to drop the interstitial as a matter of principal or on the assumption that the difficult-to-quantify long-term benefit will pay off later, but we'd have to make that decision not in the absence of data, but actually in opposition to the data.
I am not sure I agree with your first point. It seems the most frequent case is that a user wants to access content right away. Regardless of how much "better" the native experience might be, its a lot of hoops to jump through to fulfill the immediate need.
I certainly can't argue that it does yield positive business results under certain scenarios, but for the average user it seems to injure common web experiences.
Sure -- that makes sense. I find that it depends upon the category or space that the company is in.
For eCommerce, this type of interstitial is a no-brainer: users have an easier time feeling more secure purchasing through an app vs. Safari or some other mobile browser. (Especially if it's Apple Pay enabled!)
For content heavy sites, it might be that the opposite is true: faster access to content can be used to hook the user. If you own one of these sites, you still need to design a method to get the user to come back repeatedly after you post updates. Email subscription modals do a good job at this, but people hate giving their email - especially on mobile.
Considering that even Amazon's iOS app was worse than their site the last time I checked—which is really impressive since their site is terrible—I doubt I'm going to gain anything by installing the app for Bob's House of Air Conditioners or whatever.
> "Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web"
Can you provide an example of an app that is infinitely better than its mobile website?
If you can just provide one example, and not any of the tech giants. One example where there's a "mobile web experience" as you put it, and a native app.
As someone who started in Windows 97 and .NET at the 1.1 Framework release: VBA is a gateway drug to a career in MS languages.