Redesigning Exec - Again | Dark Hacker News

20 points by ZenJosh 13 years ago | 13 comments

gue5t 13 years ago |

It's a good thing a name like "exec" wouldn't immediately cause any hackers to think of something else, like, I don't know, one of the most important syscalls of all time.

endgame 13 years ago | |

Yeah, I expected a discussion on the relative merits of the different exec calls and some new proposal that the author thought would be better in some way.

I got a slideshow of something on a background of raspberries.

pclark 13 years ago |

I have to wait how long to ascertain what exec is?

The landing page should say "Exec will do whatever you desire for $25/hour, such as:"

and then carousel through examples.

rallison 13 years ago |

Nice redesign. It is definitely more intriguing, for me at least, than the current exec site.

However, your current font choice for most of the text displays pretty badly on Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/ERhwXio.png

Take a look at the small text (especially the e character), such as "Tell us what you'd like and we'll get an Exec on it within 10 minutes. Everyday from 9am to 9pm."

I've verified this on two installs of Chrome on Windows 7 (Version 24.0.1312.57 m and Version 26.0.1403.0 dev-m), so it might be worth looking into.

nathos 13 years ago | |

Looks like it's an issue with the particular version of Proxima Nova that's being @font-face embedded.

I don't notice those problems with the version of Proxima Nova served up from TypeKit.

ZenJosh 13 years ago | | |

I think you'd be right on that one, Exec's iOS interface font is Proxima Nova and I used a bit of a dodgy @font-face generator since I don't have a typekit membership

untog 13 years ago |

Hrm. I'd definitely put some forward and back buttons on there, or somehow indicate that it's part of a slideshow. The delay between slides was significant enough that I thought it was just a static page saying "Exec will do your grocery shopping".

In all honesty, I'm not sure that leading with that one specific statement is ideal. Many people would have pressed back before anything even happened.

ZenJosh 13 years ago | |

I'm kicking myself right about now, I played around with slide timing for the best part of 10 minutes to find an ideal pause, in the end I increased it by a third to make sure the slightly-heavier-than-they-should-be images had chance to load before the slide advanced.

I was planning on spending another couple of days optimizing the home page and completing work the rest of the application UI, which was almost complete, but EXEC released their official redesign earlier today so I had to rush it out. Guess that's just the way it goes sometimes

karenxcheng 13 years ago |

Exec's designer (of the current redesigned site) here -

Nice job! Very impressive how quickly you got this up given that we released it just this morning. I like the typography and alignment you have, and putting the live feed on the landing page is a very interesting idea. Thanks for taking the time to do this!

ZenJosh 13 years ago | |

Hey Karen!

Thanks for the feedback! I've been redesigning the whole Exec UI over the past couple of days, I didn't anticipate an actual redesign being launched a day before mine though so I rushed to get just the homepage up in time.

Love the official redesign, Exec is such an interesting service, it really deserved a solid, clean new design

pbreit 13 years ago | |

Is Exec getting out of "tasks"? The two tabs being "Cleaning" and "Errands" makes me wonder.

darkxanthos 13 years ago |

I'll say this... I'm going to Exec's site now because of your redesign. Kudos.