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The first generation of "internet hard drive" companies (xdrive, idrive, etc) were based on the old LAN model of a file share that happens to live on the Internet. Accessing every file over the internet was slow, creating a ton of friction. Dropbox provided true synchronization technology, so performance was fast and you could continue to work on files ...

Opinions vary, but I think one of the key ingredients in their success was the "it just works" factor. Dropbox took a seemingly simple issue that people had struggled with forever (easy sharing of files over a network) and made it a transparent process. I think it also helped that the service didn't also co-market itself as a shady way to share copyright ...

The short answer: It depends, but typically user interfaces (UI's) are not legally protected. You should not be able to patent obvious, non-novel ideas (but sometimes the patent office fails to verify the originality of patent applications, sadly). You also cannot patent ideas that are already in general use in the industry, or a visual appearance (a ...

One of my favorite books on this subject is called Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. I highly recommend it. It's full of practical examples of little things that can make a big difference in your site's usability.

Good question. I've logged into a few new web apps recently, and have experienced that 'what do I do now?' feeling on the first use. For that reason, I'm putting a lot of effort into merging my sign up workflow and user experience into the first few uses of my app, keeping them on board and walking them through the app, hopefully motivating my users to ...

From the sound of: Once a person pays, how do I know which user he was signed in ? How do i force the user to login first before being able to click the paypal button and make payment ? Otherwise, I would receive money, but wouldn't know which user to mark as "PAID" in my database. it seems you need a programmer, frankly showing a link to ...

In general, I believe, a "good" design is one that supports the purpose of the web site. Thus, there's no general answer. It simply depends on the purpose. However, there are some elements that every web page has or should have in one form or another: Call To Action The most importent element. You want your users to do something, so you must tell them ...

There is also a relevant post by 37 Signals on this topic: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_The_Blank_Slate.php For the design of traditional management information BI dashboards, I can't recommend this book highly enough: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167

I prefer username, don't make me type my full email address please! In the registration process you should ask for the email address to make sure your users can reset their password/username if needed. I usually have the same username for many different sites but different email addresses, depending on what type of site it is.

I am not 100% sure of the question but will guess it is one of two things: you want to create a simple form that captures reviews - if so use something like http://www.wufoo.com that will handle the form capture and send you the results via email or downloadable file that you can import into your database. you want a form that captures your data that looks ...

Drew Houston actually has presentation on this called Startup Lessons Learned. It will run you through most of what you want to know. It's simple It's easy to install It works without interupting me It solves a real problem most people have It's free to try To upgrade, I have to tell people They had 20,000+ users before they even finished the product

One of the companies I advise uses UserTesting.com, and it's awesome. Their product is a consumer-oriented web site with a very broad market (almost any adult in the US is a potential customer). UserTesting.com lets them make a revision to their site and test whether the change is helpful or not. We do a ton of conversion funnel testing to understand if the ...

Besides usability tests being a waste of money IMO you should really be careful even if you believe in them. I would therefore get clarity on the following questions. What assurance do you have that they in fact have access to the right demographics Is it helpful to talk about demographics when it comes to your product Is it helpful for you to get ...

I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, so b) and c) alone are dealbreakers for me. For "regular" users: I'd say logon via email and password; email (as user id) and password and nothing else. My reasons are: Many users are not on social networks, so a 'classic' logon method is required. The email & password dialog is well known and has good usability. More ...

I think the Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth are fine where there's a natural link between your application and those networks. However, I think the regular username/password logins are important for people who either don't have a Facebook/Twitter account or don't want to link those accounts to your app until they've used it for a while. If your app ...

I would suggest you use username as key identifier as you need to allow for users to change their email address. You may consider also asking for (and verifying) an email address during registration incase the user forgets their password. ie. on the forget password form allow the user to enter a username or email.

First off, my startup does something somewhat similar. In addition to providing dashboards and analytics around what people do we primarily use that data to give site users points, badges, etc. to motivate engagement. The basic framework revolves around recording activity, though. A company called Mixpanel does almost exactly what you are talking about. I ...

There's this word that I love to throw around: "impute." Your users will impute the value of your platform before they even use it on the basis of the experience they have during their first contact. If your platform is clunky and the interface isn't slick and intuitive, that experience imputes (bad) attributes of the platform to the user. Also, now more ...

When I got hooked on Dropbox there weren't really that many alternatives to it. There were a few that offered a backup + some sort of syncing interface on top of Amazon S3 and there was Microsoft's Live Mesh which was in beta and didn't look very appealing at the time. Here is why I personally think DB was successful. It's extremely simple to use and ...

I found usertesting.com to be useful and cost effective. I summarised my experiences here: http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/01/29/seeing-your-software-through-your-customers-eyes/

We use Usertesting a lot :) It really helps to see if you User Interface is intuitive enough, how clear is you message for visitors and what impression your site makes on them. Plus it helps sometimes to catch bugs you'd never discover yourself. Awesome service - it's like getting in the head of your visitors. Other tool you may want to use to monitor your ...

Every additional piece of information you ask for will reduce the sign up rate. Therefore you really need to ask yourself how valuable each piece of information is to you. A First/Last Name enables you to personalize emails and improve their deliverabiliy, so is probably worth it if you expect to email people. Gender isn't relevant unless you are running ...

I would say you should at least get First name or Nick name to make your communication to the user more personable. You can always collect the rest in stages, when customer will want something from you like free calculation or PDF doc or what ever. Also now day I would suggest integrating facebook connect. It doesn't get any lazier for the user than that ...

Why can't the user have the option: Email doubles as the Username if no username entered. Login using either the email or username as the username. This way, users that setup the account under a company email address can change it and keep it associated with the username for this account. Obviously more difficult to implement, but the goal seems to ...

When I used to work a 9-5 job, I used to change job every few years... that meant I changed email every few years. If you set the login to be an email address once-and-for-all-time... and I change my email address, then I either have to lose my login for your system, or change the unique identifier that you use for me to login. It's a much better idea to ...

You should check out the openid-selector project. You will notice it is the same as the one built in to this site. Check out the demo page you will see it's almost identical. It's also very easy to integrate into your site. Note: This is just 3rd party login and not full user integration. So although the user is authenticated through Facebook etc. it ...

and welcome to this site! :-) what technologies I would want my developer to know Hard to say. Things are so specialized nowadays, for a world-class effort you are looking at a team of 3+ people as a bare minimum, even for a super-simple kids game. Each person will be contributing more or less depending on the stage of development you're in. If I ...

The most important thing for any dashboard is the ability to select exactly which gadgets and what type of information to be on the dashboard, instead of several preselected graphs and tables, which in most cases are only slightly relevant to the information that I'm really interested in. It would be really nice if there is an option to change the way in ...

PayPal offers a couple of services. Based on your comments, I assume you are using the PayPal payment option. They also happen to offer a payment gateway -- the Payflow Gateway, which was purchased from VeriSign several years ago. Payment gateways do not process payments. Gateways provide the infrastructure to connect to a payment processor. Gateways ...