This is the question behind everything that we do.

I read about it in Freakonomics ,  but not until recently that I realize how true that is, particularly in web world.

Recently, I started a site, called Delve Learning , to help ESL teachers develop lesson plans and advance the discipline by helping one another.

In the first few weeks, the site got a good number of visitors and page views, but no one create a lesson.

From the stats, we can see that visitors browse around the site, read some lessons that my editor posted then leave. The average page views/visitor is 11.

I'm not accusing our users the crime of selfishness. It's not theirs exclusively. We're all guilty of it. If everyone is doing it, does it count as a crime?

They simply don't have time to spare on creating something for a complete stranger. The reason "helping the community" is not compelling enough to make the effort of creating a lesson on our site worthwhile.

Many users browse our site because they assume that they can find good lessons on our site that they can use in the future. It's worth the time because if they find a good lesson or if, at least, the quality of the lessons on our site is good, then in the future they could return and use the lessons for the class they teach. 

In conclusion, we need a very strong argument to convince users to do what we want them to do on our site. In other words, we need to have a good answer when they as: "What's in it for me?"

Tha's the question that one of my colleagues likes to ask when we review a design.

Before this, I had never thought of design in economic way.

It's interesting to put value on each visual element and the entire composition as a whole.

How do you justify the value of adding contrast to a block of text? Maybe you did that to clarify the visual hierarchy, but does that cost you the clean feel that you originally had?

This way of thinking is beneficial because it forces us to see the design holistically and makes us aware of the value of our design.

Obviously the objective of designing is to increase value. If each action that we take is a trade, at the end of the process, do we end up with profit or loss?

Most of web designers have experienced the pain of spending hours scripting simple motion effect whether with Javascript or Actionscript.

As these languages get more sophisticated, more and more tools become available. If you're in need of these, today is your lucky day! I just added a category of links fot this called "toolkits" (look for it on the left column). 

This allows us to use custom fonts that are not available on the user's machine which then allows the design to be more expressive and dynamic.

This solution uses PHP and Javascript. It's dynamic so we can simply change the html code and have the text rendered automatically without having to recreate images.

All you need and how to apply it: "Dynamic Text Replacement " by Stewart Rosenberger from A List Apart.

Toubleshooting guide provided by Stewart Ulm who created this solution. 

Here's a sample of DTR in action 

"I am a sincere believer in the idea that miscommunication and mistakes are evidence that you are doing something. Especially when you are doing both. Doing something right is highly unlikely. Thus doing something wrong is almost usually guaranteed. If you don't do anything at all, in the short term you win because you do nothing wrong. Which immediately looks better as compared to the person that's messing up all the time because they're trying to get something done for the first time."  -John Maeda

the above is an excerpt from John Maeda's blog titled "Setup for failure = setup for success ". 

Last night, on my flight back from New York, I tuned in to an episode of Inside the Actor's Studio with martin lawrence as  the guest actor.

Towards the end of the show, a first year acting student asked martin for something to motivate her to keep on going despite of all the rejections that she received.

Martin responded by saying that you can have 10,000 failures and have the 10,001th opportunity to be your  big break. You have to be destined to prove your critics wrong.

From the same blog entry, John Maeda says:

"Having good luck is proof that you're iterating over and over and over and because you're failing so much, your potential for success increases."

In conclusion, we should take comfort in knowing that we're going forward; not in the situation we're at. Look inside and ask ourselves if we're advancing in our personal journey.

are the optimal number of words for every line of text so users can read comfortably without losing their place on the paragraph (a problem that could occur when te lines get too long).

A challenge:

How can I show my love and passion in my design, have fun in the process of designing and allow users to experience all these in the end product? 

1. Reveal/Expose links that users essentially need so they won't have to look for it to simplify the experience.
2. Hide unnecessary visual elements and display them on demand (i.e.display second level menu items on hover)