Subverted Design
joelcalifa.com
joelcalifa.com
I am in awe over the sentence claiming, "Your ... friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you." This gives me—a non-user—some insight into a phenomenon I see in Facebook users: a belief that there are no other forms of communication left in this world. Facebook inculcates and continuously reinforces a notion that other communication media are not only uncool, but essentially don't exist. To Facebook and its true-believer users, there is no way to email a friend. No way to write a personal blog entry. No way to make a phone call. No way to use any other means of communication. It's Facebook or living in a cave. You don't want to live in a cave, do you?
Even the less true-believer users will be conflicted about their inability to stay up to date with their 1,700 Facebook friends, apparently unwilling to recognize that no one has 1,700 friends and that life can be very fulfilling without hearing trivial updates from 1,650 people you had a passing contact with some time in your life.
But whatever. I don't mean to argue here that anyone should stop using Facebook. I'm merely recognizing that cancellation dialog as a triumph of user hostility.
Only a combination of laws that forbid the worst practices and better education for citizens can solve the problem. Because, as for today, improving our brains to remove our cognitive failures it's not an option. Animals evolved tricks, hacks and heuristics to deal with world rules that are completely subverted in the on-line world.
> If you look at a Product Manager’s performance reviews, you’ll see they’re often inextricably tied to metrics. Make this number go up. Now make it go up more. Make that other one go down. Ok, here’s your bonus.
This goes way deeper than UX design. A good read on the topic may be https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/04/forget-more-re... . We need to rethink corporations, that will allow all citizens to have a moral behaviour at their jobs. Instead to have to wait to become "... immensely valued within the tech world. ... well compensated." to be able to afford it.
We love to hate microtransactions, timers and loot boxes, but the fact is that those techniques won the war long ago. Some games have tried to be the 'White Knights' of monetization, but those who have succeed are far and wide.
The only reason why there has been significant backslash recently is because producers noticed that they could get away with it and kept pushing the boundaries until it became so outrageous that it elicited a response. Personally I stay cynical; it remains to be seen if there will be a change in trends in the industry in response to player's backslash.
> We need to rethink corporations, that will allow all citizens to have a moral behaviour at their jobs
Either people who like antipatterns die off, or they don't.
Do we have information that suggests any of this will be different?
…We think there are other things more worth using our skills and experience on…
…We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind, we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.”
— First Things First, 1964
Lately I've been fascinated by that all new apps and services I've started to use are all broken.
A first surprise was Instagram has no iPad app just mobile; Pinterest doesn’t let you upgrade your profile pic on web just inside the app; the Dribbble app doesn’t let you update your profile nor upload posts; Pinterest can’t take a https url in your profile just www; when adding a photo on Behance the photos from the iPad folder are doubled; and so on.
My first thought was: we live in the era of design, there are billion dollar companies, yet the experience they offer sucks.
And the second: what the hell those designers and developers do out there? Is everybody in a bubble in the valley?
It's just splitting design resources, engineering and testing resources, and shutting out customers who actually want to use the service but don't have the system on which they chose to focus.
Companies should be user focused... if your business or product metrics aren't aligned with user value, try to fix that or leave. Declaring yourself liberated from metrics, planning processes, or other structure because you are the user advocate at the table is so unproductive -- whether it comes from a designer, a sales person, or anyone else.
At the very very least, if you are going to claim authority for advocating for the user, you should be held to the same standards as PMs (should be): do user research, be data driven, and make the outcomes of your research useful to other people in doing their jobs.
The AirBnB and Etsy ones in particular - they show there is demand and a limited number of spaces/inventory/etc. That's useful information to me!
How annoying is it to find the perfect place to stay but when you go to book they're sold out... and you just missed the last spot? Same thing for buying something.
Now you can argue they could communicate those differently but it's a good feature.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/los-angeles-...