Published January 10th, 2014

Weekend Reading - 500 feet in the air

Design Objective

Why Netflix walked away from personalization. TL;DR when switching costs are zero, novelty beats personalization every time:

When you can order any movie instantly online, personalization isn’t as valuable — since if the movie is a dog, you simply click over to another movie. Today, in 2014, Netflix’s online interface has a series of rows of film titles, and most of them aren’t personalized recommendations at all.

Diagonal UI optimized for single hand IX. Because how often do you use your phone with one hand?

Estimated reading time in web design. YMMV but this is worth testing:

What's more interesting though—people either followed me, subscribed to my blog, or retweeted my articles 66.7% more often.

Lines of Code

ECMAScript 6: merging objects via Object.assign()

Stop Writing JavaScript Compilers! Make Macros Instead. Agree that "Macros are modular, Compilers are not!" If you're interested, check out sweet.js.

dchest/semicolon-js – "the most useful JavaScript library for cargo cult programmers."

Jenn $chiffer trolling on Medium:

California Style Sheets are a standard, meaning there is a group of people at W3Schools who come up with new properties (like border-radius and box-shadow) every year. For some time, they did not know that the Node group at W3Schools was coming up with ways to update the styling of a page without CSS.

Tools of the Trade

Refactoring your JavaScript code with Grasp. Interesting project, lets you run structural search, replace and refactoring against JavaScript code. Stuff like:

$ grasp '#remote' -R remoteConnection file.js

tooling/authoring-styleguide is an authoring style guide for technical content, example:

Avoid duplication: If there are 2 pieces of information on a subject, how will the user know if there’s 3 and the user has missed one? We also fight with ourselves for search results if we duplicate information.

Fast interactive prototyping with Sketch and d3.js. Export UI mocks from Sketch (as SVG), wire them with d3.js, get interactive prototypes in the browser.

Ten reasons we switched from an icon font to SVG

Jake Archibald: