Alen Christen Field notes Email Alen

Field notes / Volume 01

Useful thinking for sites that need to work.

Notes from building software, ecommerce, advertising, booking, and search experiences. The numbers are labeled as examples, the tradeoffs stay visible, and every article ends with something you can check.

01Traffic
02Message
03Decision
04Action

Editorial rule

Show the mechanism.

A useful article should reveal how a decision was made. That means inputs, assumptions, failure states, and the point where another answer could be reasonable.

Examples here are working models, not promises. When a number is hypothetical, it is marked as hypothetical. When a recommendation depends on context, the dependency is named.