The main thing I wish I did differently was charge by the day instead of hourly to give myself a bit more breathing room to think long-term without the feeling that I had to make every second count.

The work here was describing how to eliminate these delays using a principle I like to call assume success.

When publishing content on FL, you had to wait until the server successfully responded before you were allowed to do something else. Whether consciously or not, these sorts of penalties for interaction naturally discourage future interactions.

Sometimes feeling fast, is more important than actually being fast.

I used this system to design self-documenting components that were easy to develop against, and allowed the rest of the team to build new and consistent UI without needing me.

Tying color to function. Users wouldn’t need this to explicitly explained – they would naturally form associations between like colored controls which would help them parse and learn the interface.

Adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I proposed a pyramid of needs for Futureland, with basic usability as it’s foundation.

Making mockups is easy, communicating is hard. So the first thing to do was establish a shared foundation and vision. I started by asking questions to understand the thinking behind the existing design, and by collecting feedback from the community.

The cumulative result of these paper cuts was an interface that appeared minimalist but required regular pauses in workflow to remember how to use.