Make it good.
As front-end engineers, our job is ultimately to produce and deliver the front-end “experience.” That is, in addition to the core service (eg., a photo sharing site) which you are providing, you are also responsible for replicating and maintaining the quality of the visual aesthetic, including attention to detail in your UI.
Making it really good.
It’s “the little things” – small layout changes, single-pixel margin tweaks and color fiddling done as part of this process – that can sometimes seem overly nit-picky and risk being overlooked or sacrificed in order to meet deadlines, but the result of this effort has value: It’s quite obvious when UI polish has been done, and it’s something everyone can appreciate – even if they don’t know it.
Getting the fine details down “just so” can take extra time and effort, but in my experience has always been justified – and whenever your work is under a microscope, attention to detail is a wonderful opportunity to make it shine.
– On UI Quality (The Little Things)
An Incomplete History of Twitter - Support for @Replies
I was reminded of the inception of @Replies on Twitter during a recent conversation about the early stages of Twitter, and the moment when users first “got it.”
This excerpt comes from an email sent by @Biz Stone introducing support for the @reply convention. Note the date, May of 2007; Twitter was nearly a year old before this behavior was supported.
From: Biz Stone
Date: Thu, May 31, 2007 at 9:07 PM
Subject:Forward Motion
Hello Twitter-ers,
There’s been a bunch of forward motion at Twitter HQ in two weeks. We’ve done significant work on our infrastructure to make things better, we’ve built some new features, and we’re adding new ways to interact with Twitter. We’d love to have you come by and check things out! http://twitter.com
Support for @Replies
We noticed a whole bunch of Twitter-ers adopting a new way to communicate specifically to individuals in a public way by adding an @ symbol before a username like this: “@biz thinking I’ll get a soy latte too!” To make this experience a bit better, we added a few features to support this behavior.
- The Replies Tab will display an archive of @replies
- @Replies are followed by an ‘in reply to’ link for context
- @username automatically links the username to the profile
