mattsjohnston5

Boatbound - San Francisco, CA - Full-Stack Developer

We're looking for a lead engineer who wants to be a part of a small but growing product team of two developers and a designer.

Boatbound is the first fully insured 'pier-to-pier' boat rental marketplace. We help make boating more accessible by allowing boat owners to earn money while renting out their boat to other community members.

Our tech:

  - Rails 4 back-end
  - Backbone search page
  - SASS, Coffeescript, and HAML
  - Well-organized UI library built on top of Foundation

Oh, and I love getting suggestions. Have your friends tweet me their favorite watches and I'll check them out!

I think it does that when London is already a day ahead of the current timezone. That's obviously a bit counter intuitive so if like to get that working properly.

Yeah, for each illustration I started with a front-facing photo and lined up the center of the face with the exact center of the document. From there I make sure every circle I draw is perfectly centered and I draw all the hands facing upwards.

Thanks for the encouragement. I've thought about doing a tutorial, but I hadn't considered doing a tmelapse. That could be pretty cool.

I already had Timex tweet out the site! https://twitter.com/timex/status/369505126752346112

More details have just been released on Uber's blog - http://blog.uber.com/2013/08/02/uber-boatbound-sail-to-work/

I completely agree with your point here about what the functional purpose of a user interface is. I would also agree that almost all styles of design have the potential to accomplish all the functional goals of an interface, except, perhaps, flat design.

Once you've adequately addressed the functional purposes of an interface, you are free as a designer to design it however the heck you want to. Usually the rest of these design decisions should be made through the lens of brand image and how you want your users to feel. The rest of the design process is practically a science (ie how the average person scans a page, perceives content hierarchy, expects certain UI elements to perform certain actions, etc). So the bulk of the truly creative portion of design is subjective, and designers should remember that. Yes, designers are always forced to be creative when solving UX and architecture design challenges, but ultimately the result is not subjective. Your objective goal is to help the most amount of users understand your website and accomplish their goals. When designing the style of your website, you're deciding how to influence people's emotions. An almost flat design like Google's is great for Google (and I truly mean that, I really love their design aesthetic as of late in their apps), but that's not because an almost flat design aesthetic would be great for every website. The almost flat design aesthetic makes me think of digital products, modern companies, and a subtle, friendly personality. This works for Google as it does for many other companies, but it might not work for yours.

Find your brand image. Craft your own emotional experience for users that is unique to you and your company. And when you find something you like, don't tell other designers it's better than their styles ;)

Do you see this new stack of technologies as a gradual evolution of our current stack, or do you feel the technologies are inherently broken and need to be replaced completely?

That's an interesting idea having the browser handle the nav persistence. I assumed it would be done with JS but I supposed when it becomes common enough having it baked into the browser would be a better idea.

Our web technology is such that we don't need to settle for a sub-par user experience that is a relic of the days where we had to serve static HTML documents one by one.

Beautifully done!

You should set the viewport width to 960px so that mobile phones see the whole page on page load rather than a zoomed in corner.

Sure, regular users KNOW how to scroll to the top, but why make them? I think that fixed headers add some good convenience, especially on long pages.