gffrd

“why pay to go see a movie that someone else made, when I can see a movie I made for free?”

This means they've figured out a way to keep the screen from wobbling when poked … let the theorizing commence!

Actually, that sounds quite similar.

> The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.

So … designers?

The market is: people with homes and an iPhones. That is to say, a fair number of people.

Apple is splitting out a valuable use case that is confusing to people when lumped in to a “do everything” product (iPad).

Wine grapes aren’t good for eating. People buy big, sweet grapes with thin skins and no seeds … which is virtually the opposite of what grapes grown for winemaking are.

Go wild. Cancel 'em all.

That assumes the market is saturated, and there's nothing you could do to convince a non-customer to become a customer.

I think they're grabbing at universally-understood frictions that people associate with pleasure or anxiety … or, most powerfully, identity.

We all know the feeling of wanting to be successful, or to go on a great vacation. Showing these scenarios creates strong emotional response in the audience - we're now the people winning at work, going on a great vacation. This is especially important when you're selling something dull. See: insurance.

Imagine the fear these people will feel walking in to a vacation planned by … a ROBOT!

These are modern infomercials. Concrete pains ("planning a vacation is hard!"), shallow solutions that don't stand up to real-world use, and, in the end, a promise left unfilfilled. (And a thing in your drawer that takes up space.)

> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!

I'll play!

My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%.

The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone.

A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something.

Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen.

If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours.

If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot.

A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size.

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[1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes.

[2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one.

[3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S...

[4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller

[5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk

[6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

How do we know murder is bad?

Why do people lie?

Define “bad”.

Why, are you looking for one?

That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."

Scanability and limitations of layout technology from 100 years ago.

Narrow columns allow you to maximize the amount of stories that can be shown on the front page. Good for scanning, OK for reading.

This is a totally context-dependent decision.

Technical capability pales in comparison to human desire.

> It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.

Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.

Tell us what we’re missing.

Don't you just love how, instead of making tradeoffs or prioritizing, we just do more, worse?

“I’m not sure what the big deal about tripling the number of tire changes in the race is.”

… and the 9+’ stoppage for every match.

> the most inconsequential ones

This is like saying “customers aren’t worried enough about the corporate process - they only care about the end product!”

Man cannot live on lettuce alone.

Could see this being useful for people who are on the road for a living, or regularly operating in areas where they’re not familiar with the offerings. Truck drivers, salespeople, etc.

That said, kneejerk after using it is: price is a challenging anchor, because food is not uniform. I’d be curious if users are more interested in “under $10, ignoring all else” or “a better deal than comparable” - though, there’s a lot of subjectivity in that.

Gasbuddy works because 1 gallon of gas = 1 gallon of gas, so price is a useful anchor.

$5 for sushi at one place could be a bad deal, while a great deal at another place.

An $8 steak would be cheap. An $8 hot dog would be a ripoff.

I’d be skeptical of restaurants luring people with a single cheap item, or about quality/portion changes.

All this said, Ikea is known for designing furniture _around_ the price their target customer thinks a table should cost. Restaurants are likely (hopefully!) aware of where these price thresholds are for their customers … and your site could be an interesting way of sending them a different type of customer than they’d historically targeted. Or, allow them to refine an offering to maximize profit at the $10 price point.

As others have said, engage restaurants and make them part of the equation. They’re not your adversary.

In short: cool! Do lots of experiments and research!