Laughter Doesn’t Scale
trackchanges.postlight.com
trackchanges.postlight.com
The new button performed a destructive action (because it blocked the recipient from responding to the email thread) without any kind of confirmation. Additionally, it was placed where it was likely to be hit by accident. (Apparently where the "Send & Archive" button used to be, although I don't have that on my Gmail theme.)
In short, they didn't test the damned thing. Even a half-hour of user-testing would have shown how easily the button was pressed by accident, and how devastating an accidental press was.
And again: it doesn't matter if the change is a joke or not, you don't push up a change unless you've done some basic UX work on it.
Actually no, the problem is that the joke they came up with is the type that requires UX testing in the first place, i.e. it changes the behavior of a product in a very noticeable and non-reversible (by the user) way. As opposed to something harmless, like a joke announcement or something.
Several years ago Blizzard announced the "Archivist" class for their popular game, Diablo 3. They put a good amount of effort into the joke, with a short gameplay video and everything. But it was a joke, and the class didn't actually make it into the game, and everyone had fun.
However, that completely goes against the point of this joke. It's not a prank if they prompted, "Are you sure you want to send a Minion gif and mute yourself from this conversation?"
Nah, people just click through. GMail has a much better model: mask destructive / un-undoable behaviour behind a short timer, make the action undo-able until the timer is up.
Strictly, the action you start when you click `Send' is reversible for a few seconds, before it actually launches the nukes. But I'd rather call it `delayed' when talking to a human about it.
Delaying is a way to make some non-reversible actions sort-of reversible.
Muting is a much bigger problem.
In general I'd say it's a bad idea to play jokes with email. Most people use it for important work, and many use it as part of their livelihood (not just for professional correspondence as in finding jobs but as a component of their day to day work). Just... don't fuck with that, it's unprofessional to mess with people. Imagine a car maker doing an over the air firmware update of their cars to disable the signal blinkers because isn't it funny how so many people never signal while driving?
The problem with this button is fairly obvious in hindsight. Google injected humor into many people's business and personal worlds where it wasn't wanted or expected.
This article is yet another apologist for what is clearly a lack of foresight by Google.
By the way, I notice society explaining away a lot of behavior by others lately. People seem afraid to criticize products and other people these days.
Let's call this what it is: a massive mistake. Google corrected it as soon as they realized it and apologized. We can move on.
I'll freely grant that I don't know what, specifically, they should do, but "sorry lol" doesn't really cut it.
/s
Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives.
What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else?
If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.
> I always say, there's nothing like a good joke.
> No, and that was nothing like a good joke.
BUT I strongly disagree with the post that seems to argue (without saying it plainly) that the prank was indeed funny and it's the fault of "the Internet" if it didn't work, because, it seems, masses can't take a joke.
When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past year")
Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, stress cases) exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions. Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.
And they say humor doesn't scale.
Strangers are always going to require more convincing than friends.
"My friends laughed at it!" is a common standard for tech humor nowadays. It's highly misleading especially if you are a part of the echo chamber.
The Onion scales. It doesn't scale past the Generation X audience, but oh, it scales.
So I'd say in the above mentioned cases laughter did become "infinitely scalable". But then again, the guys and girls at Google who came up with this stupid idea are no comedic geniuses.
It's like people think every 20 something in the sixties was progressive, but there were tens of millions of conservative kids that grew up into conservative adults...
In general, it has the same kind of general progressive ideals you'd expect from such a comedic outlet, and even if it makes heavy fun of american society, it can't escape the american viewpoint on the world (e.g it's P.C. in essence, even while making fun of P.C.-isms, it shares the "success is everything" mindset in mocking the middle and "white trash" class that's prevalent everywhere, seldom questions us views of foreign countries and core foreign policy "facts" -- except for rooting for the doves in the the hawks vs doves internal us discussion, etc.).
To me, this point-of-view tends to look more progressive than conservative, but I might be overlaying my own biases.
Changing GMail to render (but not send!) all emails in Comic Sans would be such a change. (With a notification at top to turn it off)
Offering "Clippy" now also in Hotmail would be such a change. (with the ability to hide it)
Adding a "Send (and attach a gif that makes me seem like an idiot, and nuke the conversation)" button where a normal send button used to be is not.
A good joke is hard, and we all have made jokes that backfired before. But for a corporation, such as Google, in a huge project of theirs, they should try to double and triple check each joke for damage it might do.
it's particularly important to account for psychological or social destructiveness.
Rickrolling someone can be funny. Pretending that you're pregnant and then saying "April Fools" later in the day can be psychologically harmful to those who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child. Replacing someone's PC startup sound with flatulence can be hilarious. Posting a fake, mean story about someone else can prompt others to pile on thinking that you're serious, and damage a relationship. Rendering all webpages in Comic Sans is worth a chuckle. Nuking someone's e-mail conversation can cost people their jobs, or at the very least can result in important (business-critical or even life-critical) information getting lost in the shuffle.
This joke could have been funny, if it had been carefully tailored to be non-dangerous and non-destructive. It wasn't.
Gail is a major figure in the branding industry. She was behind the branding of The Simpsons characters. She managed the Disney Princesses branding. Before her work, there were princesses in Disney films, but they hadn't been harnessed into a supergroup merchandising team, pulling over $3 billion a year in tie-in sales.
"Mic drop" had to have her approval.
[1] http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison...
I can't get on board the tear train of "victimized by technology, technology maker should make amends!" when the impact of victimization is so small, even the "lost my job because technology maker and especially my boss are retarded" is pretty low-impact. I generally have the attitude of "Sucks, but get on with life" to a lot of things, though.
Yeah, I'm waiting for Snopes to weigh in on that one.
I would be willing to wager large sums of money that this didn't happen, and even larger sums that if it did, it was resolved in about 18 seconds, and the person is still employed come Monday (with a good laugh to share with coworkers).
One of the attributes of a good harmless practical joke is that it doesn't call attention to deeper, unsettling truths like that.
Since users are quite good at doing everything you don't want them to do, this create great opportunities for mistakes and abuse.
Google's problem was this joke was forced on people, even when they weren't in a mood to make any jokes. If it was an optional button to the right, or activated by some other means that wasn't 'click a button that many people used, or sometimes have it wotk automatically', then people wouldn't be complaining about it.
--
Glass half-full kind of guy.
What the heck? I'm not a woman, so apparently no one can threaten me on the internet?
Sure women probably receive far more internet threats, but we should use language to reflect that, rather than outright lying and trivializing all the instances where men were threatened.