Design for Real Life

What Hacker News says

1. canucker2016Feb 2025
   It's amazing how dated the talk seems even though it's only 10 years old.

   The talk references an insurance website that requires a Java applet for uploading a file. Last time I neede

   It also praises Hipmunk for its ease of use. SAP bought hipmunk and shutdown the website in 2020. see https://www.concur.com/en-us/concur-hipmunk-faq

   update: reddit had a couple of suggestions for alternatives - https://www.reddit.com/r/Flights/comments/13uqmba/website_wi...

   Not sure if there's a comparable or better flight-booking site these days.

   The CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) website looks more modern/cleaned up.

   The Design For Real Life book is available to read for free on the web - see https://dfrlbook.com/

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2. foxfiredJun 2021
   To this day, every CSS I write for a website starts with a copy of the Meyerweb CSS Reset. I've been doing it for so many years yet never thought twice about it.

   Only a couple months ago I decided to check what Mr Meyer was up to. I bought his book Design for Real life thinking it was about CSS. I was delightedly surprised by the breadth of new things I learned about design that I had never considered before.

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3. jmdukeApr 2016
   I've been reading Design for Real Life (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life), and its introduction is a fairly similar mirror of this kind of snafu -- using Facebook's "Your Year in Moments" feature as a stand-in.

   When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past year")

   Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, stress cases) exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions. Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.

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