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UX Articles by Center Centre
Company blog · articles.uie.comdesignbusiness
UX Articles by Center Centre is the company blog at articles.uie.com, writing about design and business. Since 2016, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “The $300M Button (2009)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link UIE's UX articles, mainly Jared Spool's pieces, for the '$300m button' case study, the critique of Net Promoter Score, the Market Maturity model, the Ring User term and the eBay redesign approach.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts about user interface design and strategy.
Most-linked posts?
- The $300M Button (2009)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-03-06
- Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-06-06
- /death_of_relaunch/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-10
What Hacker News says?
> I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion? Well, there's always this: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ -- trigger warning: that page has annoying delayed-by-few-seconds modal popup that begs you to subscribe and, incidentally, hand out your email addre…
Comment linking /three_hund_million_button/
on “Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App”- Mz · 2016-03-06
Submitted The $300M Button (2009) as a story · 164 points
HN discussion Just like the "$300m button story" popular in UX circles: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/
Comment linking /three_hund_million_button/
on “Google Has Started Penalizing Mobile Websites with Intrusive Pop-Up Ads”Submitted Users Don’t Hate Change. They Hate Our Design Choices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis sounds like Jared Spool's Market Maturity model.[0] He breaks up your gen 3 into two separate stages: Stage 1: Raw Iron Stage 2: Checklist Battles Stage 3: Productivity Wars Stage 4: Transparency [0] https://articles.uie.com/market_maturity/
Comment linking /market_maturity/
on “WireGuard Gives Linux a Faster, More Secure VPN”Submitted Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSeen a few comments focus on the "redesign" and comparisons to Digg, and wanted to add a few comments: 1. People may forget, but Reddit was a (the?) major winner in the Digg exodus. 2. I don't think Digg every got the subreddit style discussion boards down. I think the reddit "homepage experience" vs. the typical subreddit experience to be very different. Should be interesting to see which way they slide for the red…
Comment linking /death_of_relaunch/
on “Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation”Submitted The Truth about Download Time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't want to infantilize users either, but I do want to give them the right tool for the job. Some people are core users and want powerful tools. Some are ring[1] users and want simple tools to quickly and easily do simple things without having to develop a core competency. [1] Ring User is a Jared Spool term for non-core users--they are in a ring around the core. The Core/Ring more useful model than Expert/Novic…
Comment linking /multiple_personalities/
on “Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini”Submitted Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI applaud this attitude, not least because it reminds me of the UX design story on allowing guest checkouts: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ Add a hurdle, any hurdle, to your potential users' workflow and you are doing yourself a massive disservice.
Comment linking /three_hund_million_button/
on “I will not log in to your website”The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over sever…
Comment linking /death_of_relaunch/
on “How the Digg team was acquihired”Considering case studies like "300 million dollar button" [1], they are likely losing insane amounts of money. [1] https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/
Comment linking /three_hund_million_button/
on “Amazon search was down”The "science" is quite dubious: https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmf... The reason why NPS exists is because it's an easy number to calculate that sounds convincing, and manager-types love numbers without having to think too hard about how they got them.
Comment linking /net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/
on “NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful”Github should have used the eBay approach where you gradually alter your look to avoid triggering revolt. Fade the banner from light gray to dark gray over the period of a few months! https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ > At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don’t like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages,…
Comment linking /death_of_relaunch/
on “Revert the GitHub dark header”I don't have much to add other than this reminds me of the obsession around "satisfaction" for product metrics and why that seems to always boil down to slapping NPS on it because it's a number and execs like numbers. I think this is essential reading if anyone's interested on a product-focused tangent for the topic: https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmf...
Comment linking /net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/
on “Plato's Dashboards”Oh yes, this stuff drives me nuts. A good takedown was written about the Net Promoter Score[0], but the principles are generally applicable to any one of these idiotic schemes. [0] https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmf...
Comment linking /net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/
on “Please don’t rate your waitress 4/5”I liked this old take on intuitiveness, which focuses on which user(s) something is intuitive to and why: https://articles.uie.com/design_intuitive/
Comment linking /design_intuitive/
on “Commit Mono – Neutral programming typeface”
