Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
What is the ‘shape’ of returns on investment in industrial design, UI/UX, typography etc? Is it a sigmoid with a golden mean of effort vs return… or a parabola with an unhappy valley of mediocrity?
My experience with Gwern.net design improvements is that readers appreciated changes moderately early on in making its content more pleasant to read (if only by comparison to the rest of the Internet!), but after a certain point, it all ‘came together’, in some sense, and readers started raving over the design and pointing to Gwern.net’s design rather than its content. This is inconsistent with the default, intuitive model of ‘diminishing returns’, where each successive design tweak should be worth less than the previous one.
Is there a ‘perfection premium’ (perhaps as a signal of underlying unobservable quality, or perhaps user interaction is like an O-ring process)?