Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

I keep noticing the many parallels between UX design and film editing. As an editor, I was always looking for the right cut to optimize the flow. If a cut could be made from one shot to the next, and the viewer didn’t have to change their fixation from that cut, it was a happy thing. To create tension, you do the opposite. You also place stuff in the middle of the shot to make it feel more isolated and alone. As such, it makes total sense in the West to have the “comfort” or expected action to be nestled in the right corner of the uncomfortable, pay-attention-to-me, center-of-screen dialog box, eagerly awaiting your action to move the narrative along.

If we’ve learned anything from Facebook’s many redesign and privacy fiascoes, it’s that major overhauls of large websites don’t go over well. [Digg] tried to launch way too many things all at once, and the result was a buggy platform that frightened users.

There’s a reason there isn’t Twitter version 4. or Facebook version 4; they make changes to their websites with gradual phases and staggered rollouts, making it all seem like the same platform, when in reality everything has been overhauled at least a dozen times.

Today I was driven insane by an article implying that Netflix could serve as a model for the music industry. I could go paragraph by paragraph and pick apart the argument, but that would be needlessly pedantic. I’ll quote one to exemplify what is wrong.

“With Netflix consumers have proven they will rent content – even re-run content – and stream it from the cloud. They will pay for digital content they could get for free through illegal means. They will pay if the service allows streaming through multiple devices – including mobile.”

With Netflix customers have not proven they will rent content. They have proven they will rent visual content. Visual content is a subset of the macro concept of content, and consumer behaviors in relation to such has no intrinsic corollary to aural, printed or other forms of content such as games. To put it another way, in the hierarchy of content, what applies to a sub-type does not necessarily apply to its siblings. This article uses this fallacy as a way to call for emulation of Netflix by music services.

There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about…The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you’ve got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that’s the only one most visitors will see.