Track The Time Blog

Payment gateways have the most confusing web interfaces. There’s no consistency among systems, and most of them look like they were designed by an 8 year old.

As I was configuring viaKLIX for a customer, I stumbled across this great feedback form. They actually have an option for “confusing interface.” How appropriate.

This is a classic case of a company seeing a problem and applying a band-aid to the problem, and never fixing the root problem. In this case, a confusing interface.

Seth Godin, a marketing wizard who has written many books I admire, says this about band-aid marketing: Every quarter, your company ships new products or services. And every quarter, someone says, “under the circumstances,” or “given the deadline” or “with the team we had available”… it’s the best we could do. I say ship nothing.

Good advice.

I had a chance to visit the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, AZ recently, and I took these photos. Check out the neat typefaces (obviously hand drawn in the second example).

Business Week has a feature on its web site which asks fourteen internet pioneers what advice they have for doing business online.

Specifically, they ask what not to do. Some internet giants chime in, including Netflix, Monster, Paypal, Expedia.com, Craigslist, Yahoo!, Adobe, and others. I recommend you read it.

The web design industry is quickly moving towards this model:

1. Get into the industry, make a load of web sites and become ever more frustrated because managing 50 projects a year is frustrating. Do this for 5 to 10 years until you’re an expert at making web sites.

2. Get sick of that, and begin to brainstorm ideas for making apps and products that will earn residual income. Realize that your value isn’t exclusively in designing and building web sites, but also in providing focused ideas that help your clients succeed online.

3. Start a few of them with mild success, then have the “killer idea” which you spend 1-2 years working on.

4. Launch your killer idea.

5. The last phase is all about doing what you want while the checks roll into your mail box, you’re living off of your residual income.

Only about 2% of web designers ever get past the second phase, which is unfortunate. The web design industry is filled with many bright minds, and with a little bit more momentum, people can do great things.

The good news is that ideas are all around us, and going through all of the experiences in this industry allow us to see new ideas and get ideas for how things can be better. These are the ideas that turn into killer ideas, which turn into residual income.

This post was inspired by a chat with Ward from Mister Shape.