Nothing works better than just improving your product.

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.