Labrador OmniMedia | Rails Developer/Devops Engineer | Sonoma County, California | Remote
Labrador creates software for the hospitality industry. Our flagship product, Slate, is an iOS app (think iPad wine lists) with a Ruby on Rails backend providing iOS client management and APIs. We've been in business since 2011 and are a sister company of Jordan Vineyard and Winery in Healdsburg California.
We're looking for an experienced Rails and devops engineer to develop and maintain our Rails portal on AWS. You'll be taking over a codebase from a top Rails contributor and interfacing daily with our support team and CEO.
Salary 140K+
The ideal candidate will have some experience with iOS, place a high premium on schedule flexibility and enjoy alcoholic beverages. Salary will scale up for unicorns that check all the boxes (Rails/AWS/iOS).
We use Github for source control and Slack for team messaging.
Agreed. The sample is very likely tainted by factors that made success much more likely than average if we believe that NFL coaches are both conservative (they forgo punts only when the odds are much in their favor) and rational (they are win maximizing).
Still, there is probably a case to be made that coaches should be a bit more aggressive, but that edge could be small enough that other factors (like perceived incompetence) dominate it.
I'd say the answer provided is so simplistic that it has very little explanatory power.
Commenters have already mentioned Uber and Groupon, but I'd go further and add YC love child Airbnb as well. They famously sold cereal to stay afloat etc. What does that have to do with tech hacking? Yet they have been lauded everywhere Zulily hasn't.
I'd be interested in how one separates a disruptive business that uses technology from Disruptive Technology? It seems to me there is a hair's breadth of difference between the two.
This is news for the simple reason that it isn't news.
Airbnb does put out highly technical blogs written by their engineers on how they tackled an issue, etc. Such articles in my eyes are relevant to to the "HN crowd" if you must say so.
Right to anonymity? Convicted felons lose their right to own a gun. Some might never use one to commit a crime, but they still lose that right.
This is no different. It is not reasonable to call this a slippery slope. These people were convicted of predatory crimes against children, and those of us who do not commit such crimes have nothing to fear as regards our anonymity until and unless we commit similar crimes.
Not all punishments end when you're let out of prison. Nor should they.
If your audience is developers and designers, a pure flat design is great and will likely work well.
But normal people need their hand held as to what a button is. Subtle drop shadows and gradients are the best way to instantly get someone to understand that yes, this element does something. Something important is lost in flatland.
On a side note, the vault and picture frame image on the main homepage for layervault.com is the height of skeumorphism and realistic design. Beautiful, but also kinda ironic.
> But normal people need their hand held as to what a button is. Subtle drop shadows and gradients are the best way to instantly get someone to understand that yes, this element does something. Something important is lost in flatland.
I disagree. Go to http://google.com. How many of the items in the bar at the top have gradients? Is there any confusion about whether they're clickable? Now go to Google+. Is there any confusion about whether the icons on the left are clickable, despite being flat (and even grayed out)? I'm looking at Chrome right now and none of the buttons in the toolbar look 3D. All of these examples do have a rollover effect, but even without that, the design informs you what's clickable. And mind you, these are all examples from a company that is not embracing flat design as its major aesthetic.
Users have plenty of experience with clickable items that don't look like buttons. There are a ton of ways to convey that something is clickable without trying to make it look like a physical button.
> On a side note, the vault and picture frame image on the main homepage for layervault.com is the height of skeumorphism and realistic design. Beautiful, but also kinda ironic.
Agreed. It seems quite out of place to me.
The spinning background is also really rough. It's completely gratuitous and actually makes me queasy.
The two most prominent buttons on the home page have subtle drop shadows and gradients. Google is actually a great example of restrained skeuomorphic design.
If I had to advocate for just one aesthetic (which is silly on its face), I suppose restrained skeuomorphism would be the one.
From Wikipedia: a skeuomorph is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material, but was essential to the object made from the original material"
The gradient and shadow on buttons are not just ornamental, they serve the purpose of conveying depth, and consequently that they afford being pushed (also, real-world buttons are usually a solid color).
I think we are splitting hairs here, but I agree that what we are talking about is affordance.
The reason why I use the term skeuomorphic in this context is because there are those who believe that what you and I believe is affordance is actually superfluous and ornamental.
What else is flatland design if not a complete rejection of the value of drop shadows and gradients as affordance?
Gradients and drop shadows on buttons are usually modelling solid color real world buttons; design uses an imaginary light source coming from above to mimic the way our world usually has a lamp or the sun shining up there.
For sure, Google doesn't seem to be headed toward "flatland", which was my point. Even Google, who seems to be clinging to "restrained skeuomorphism" uses flat, clickable elements in many places. I seriously doubt that they'd do so if their usability testing showed that users don't understand them.
I've got to say, I don't understand why people keep mentioning drop shadows, though. Drop shadows seem fairly uncommon. Even Google only uses them for mouseover.
And mouseover is, in my opinion, too late to indicate what's clickable and what isn't. It's a nice confirmation, but the user should already know before they even move their mouse. If you've got a user aimlessly moving their mouse over things trying to determine what's clickable, you've failed at design.
> I've got to say, I don't understand why people keep mentioning drop shadows, though. Drop shadows seem fairly uncommon. Even Google only uses them for mouseover.
Put your cursor in the search field. More shadowy goodness there. Click on your avatar in the upper right, the popover has a prominent (too prominent IMO) drop shadow. It's everywhere.
As to mouseover, I agree it's for confirmation. But if we need to confirm functionality with drop shadows and gradients - what message does that send about usability?
One thought is that perhaps we should have the drop shadows and gradients there to begin with.
> Put your cursor in the search field. More shadowy goodness there. Click on your avatar in the upper right, the popover has a prominent (too prominent IMO) drop shadow. It's everywhere.
I should have been clearer. I was referring to drop shadows on buttons.
I have to say, though, I think the search box picking up a drop shadow is the perfect example of gratuitous affordance. Putting the focus on the search box turns the border blue. Does anyone actually need the drop shadow? Alternatively, if users need the drop shadow, do they need the blue border. Do they need either one, given that the cursor appears?
> As to mouseover, I agree it's for confirmation. But if we need to confirm functionality with drop shadows and gradients - what message does that send about usability?
Tells me that they aren't really needed in the first place. And given the increasing prevalence of touch devices, I'd say that making your UI clear without resorting to mouseover effects has become a requirement.
> One thought is that perhaps we should have the drop shadows and gradients there to begin with.
If they were there to start with, the designers would no doubt have added some other hover indicator. People have grown to expect hover changes (especially with web UIs), and indeed UIs seem awkward without them. However they should still not be necessary to indicate that something is clickable.
> And mouseover is, in my opinion, too late to indicate what's clickable and what isn't. It's a nice confirmation, but the user should already know before they even move their mouse. If you've got a user aimlessly moving their mouse over things trying to determine what's clickable, you've failed at design.
Not sure I agree that normal people need a ton of hand holding, but even that's true, those people will eventually disappear.
As for the image on our homepage — that's our app icon. Pretty funny that it's quite realistic (done by the talented folks at SoftFacade). We didn't think it was a huge contradiction, since it serves as more of a pretty picture than an interface.
That said, we probably will end up throwing it out when redesign our rather outdated external site :)
No, they are born every minute of every day. They are known as kids. Check out kids using iPads and iPhones. Compare that to Android. Kids can figure out how to use iPads and iPhones really quickly. Very, very doubt the same for the Metro or Android for that matter.
"According to various reports, when someone suggested to include a touch-typing tutorial in this intro as well, since many people did not know how to use a keyboard, steve Jobs simply said not to bother as those people would die out eventually."
We were also talking when writing the blog post that it depends on what the interface is for. When designing a site that accepts user-generated content (whether it be LayerVault or Facebook), the interface—is in many respects—only there to get out of the way. A flat design is often best at showcasing others' content.
When the interface is to facilitate a straight-forward task, one could make the argument for a more embellished interface.
Cannot agree more on that layerVault's audiences being designers and developers sure does make things simpler. It's simply true that "designing specifically for tech savvy people OR a group of 60 years old folks" has each a set of very different things to take into consideration.
Although if we are saying that those 60 years old non tech savvy people would eventually disappear, then sure, why not?
I adore flat design in a aesthetic way, but saying flat design is the answer to or even plays a part in UX decisions making just sounds silly.
Is there really a point in advocating an aesthetic? It is subjective in every way. Though if the purpose is to make a style trendy, the article perhaps does make a great deal of sense.
Flat design and skeuomorphism are both styles, whereas applying affordance IS a means to an end.
If this attempt at price discrimination does indeed become popular it will be via digital menus that update their pricing automatically, not via fiddly coupons. We are quite aways away from this still due to hardware costs and the sheer number of tablets that would be needed at most full service restaurants.
I have no doubt it would be a hit with consumers. Tuesday nights out would become "a thing" for the price sensitive. That's good for everyone.
I was pretty impressed with the low tech solution in the article. I thought of the same thing as you at first, digital menus online, or on the table, or.. digital paper menus.
They instead just offer a discount up front. 10-30% if you book a particlular time. So most everyone except the fractional multiplier afraid will know how to adjust the prices on the fly.
as an aside - many cheap places that I end up at have menus posted outside for the foot trafic, that may be the perfect place to replace it with a digital sign for dynamic pricing.
Agreed. There are low tech ways to achieve a similar result. But operators, servers and managers absolutely loathe anything that changes their steps of service.
The winning solution will be completely transparent to their current workflow, and will also be seamless to the customer. Until this happens I don't think we'll see widespread adoption of new pricing strategies.
For instance, a pricing increase when many/most seats are filled is probably best way to discriminate in a restaurant. Sophisticated pricing strategies like those could become commonplace with digital menus, and the staff wouldn't have to think about it - but they would see the effect in their tip total.
I'd imagine that making easily-printed menus that are weekday/weekend prices (only two ways to discriminate) would be the way to go immediately.
One way to go that would be interesting is to remove the prices all together, and do a prix fixe menu, with the price variable depending on when you get there (have a chalkboard or a waiter tell you upon arrival). This would be low cost to implement, and certainly something worth investigating if you're a high-end restaurant.
If I drop my prices from $30 to $20 and sell out 200 seats, I've made $4000. If I fill 100 seats with walk-in customers at $30 and 100 with voucher customers at $20, I've made $5000.
Labrador creates software for the hospitality industry. Our flagship product, Slate, is an iOS app (think iPad wine lists) with a Ruby on Rails backend providing iOS client management and APIs. We've been in business since 2011 and are a sister company of Jordan Vineyard and Winery in Healdsburg California.
You can download the demo on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slate-menu/id1081898296?mt=8
We're looking for an experienced Rails and devops engineer to develop and maintain our Rails portal on AWS. You'll be taking over a codebase from a top Rails contributor and interfacing daily with our support team and CEO.
Salary 140K+
The ideal candidate will have some experience with iOS, place a high premium on schedule flexibility and enjoy alcoholic beverages. Salary will scale up for unicorns that check all the boxes (Rails/AWS/iOS).
We use Github for source control and Slack for team messaging.
Please contact me directly: josh@labradorom.com