Make every product better than it’s ever been done before. Make the parts you cannot see as well as the parts you can see. Use only the best materials, even for the most everyday items. Give the same attention to the smallest detail as you do to the largest. Design every item you make to last forever.

Shaker Philosophy of Furniture Making, quoted in “Measure Twice, Cut Once: Applying the Ethos of the Craftsman to Our Everyday Lives”

The article “Measure Twice, Cut Once: Applying the Ethos of the Craftsman to Our Everyday Lives” has been going around the office. I love the quote above and how it echoes our “Do Better” philosophy, which we apply to everything from how we code to thinking up new user experiences to why we’re in business.

Take, for example, the ever-present “carousel” function on the internet, where one area of a site features multiple stories that the visitor can cycle through, or sometimes it auto-animates from one story to the next. Heck, we’ve used it in order to feature a number of content pieces within one area. But according to the somewhat tongue-in-cheek named Should I Use a Carousel site, “1% clicked a feature. Of those, 89% were the first position. 1% of clicks for the most significant object on the home page?” (source). Of course statistics only tell part of the larger story… the real question is can we do better, either through coming up with a different solution, or rethinking the content strategy? Of course we can.