Button Pushes You (2022)
despens.systems
despens.systems
On reflection, this progression from function to call to action to obfuscated self-help-ish verbiage seems more like a general trend in marketing at all levels. Obviously, it must work in A/B testing, but I'm not sure it works in the general case. Here in the 2020s I think it serves as a kind of regurgitation of 1960s argle-bargle that's a callback to what's embedded in the brains of the children of boomers who picked up their parents' linguistic preference for out-there-isms to describe sensations of freedom from the old rigid hierarchies of the 1950s. So it's an appeal to nostalgia as much as a form of vaguely insulting corporate-speak.
More links clicked doesn't mean more people got to where they wanted to go, it could also just mean they had to try every link in order to find the one they looked for.
The most important thing to me is a clear structure and a button that takes me ro rhe clear structure. A website should be like a house. Ideally I already see at the entrance how the house is laid out and can decide where to go.
>I'm sitting here like I'm in an Apple commercial or Square or Swipely or some bullshit tech thing, instead of "OK" I'm clicking "Got it!". Like [obnoxious surfer voice] "Ok, Got it! Got it!". That's how I acknowledge menus in the computer. That's how, when it becomes total Brave New World life, your torturers -- you're gonna have to acknowledge your -- "You've been assigned 10 hours of genital torture." "Ok, Got It!"
"Users have to accept the spelled out mantra and change their attitude before accessing the next piece of information."
"The user should transform themselves into a “doer,” rather than being considerate, evaluating options"
"Before proceeding, users should identify with this new aristocratic class."
C'mon. It's just a way to visually emphasize an important next step.
Is the text sometimes self-indulgent and annoying? Yeah, it's marketing copy. That's nothing new.
Absolutely!
You'll notice my complaint about the BPY article is not about its griping over semantically incorrect uses of buttons -- I'm fine with that! My complaint is ascribing those incorrect uses to deep dark political and cultural forces, or viewing them as harbingers of societal change. That interpretation strikes me as self-indulgent nonsense.
People are styling semantic "links" as visually prominent buttons because it's a practically effective way to direct the eye, and hence a practically effective marketing strategy. Most of them don't even know what semantic html is. So this is all explained by humans taking actions to accomplish their immediate goals and not caring about things like the html spec that aren't directly relevant to those goals.
The typical landing page with big type, punchy explanations, social proof and CTA buttons evolved mostly because it works.
The topic of "links should not be styled as buttons" is well-known to everyone who has or had to do frontend web dev, at least I think so.
And the reasons for that as well.
The common violation of this rule on landing pages and CTA-like interstitials is also well-known to every designer or frontend dev who has to work on pages that sell something, I guess.
This essay presents these tradeoffs and developments in UX, and makes a very good point aboit button texts and an annoying next step in this evolution of commercial UX design that I never could quite put my finger on.
Yes, it did occasionally distract from the novel, but I'm the kind of person that doesn't mind reading and re-reading a passage.
Hover has poor usability on mobile. I don't think that I'm the only one who reads the phone on even short trips.
However, most of the interesting uses of footnotes people talk about, like nested stories, are not like this. Novels like _House of Leaves_ or _Infinite Jest_ for example. But these are fine also, because you can just assume you want to read the footnote and follow the reference. It just makes reading it more nonlinear and like a CYOA.
However, in between, there is no golden mean. It is very frustrating to have a book where half the footnotes are mere bibliographic information but the other half are interesting comments, digressions, meta-commentary, and so on. You either spend a lot of effort breaking from the text with wasted clicks/context-switches, or you miss a lot of important things. This is bad enough when it's a book using footnotes and you only have to keep glancing down at the bottom to see what it is - but it gets far worse with endnotes, and if they require multiple clicks each, you just give up!
Upside: You can do almost anything.
Downside: You have to manage (almost) everything yourself.
Downside: It lets other people do real dumb/annoying/inconvenient/stupid things, and you get to deal with the result.
Spot on.
A good example is Credit Karma UK's email alerts for credit score rise or fall, offering a button "Find out why". A click doesn't find out why. It lands you on a page of credit record info which might allow you to find out why, with considerable work and upsell-dodging.
As here, much BPY is simply false advertising at the UI core.
Specifically, Spanish translations interpret these as representing an impersonal description of the action, and thus the buttons are labelled using the infinitive: Abrir, Editar, Guardar and Borrar. Catalan versions, on the other hand, have interpreted the verbs as instructions aimed at the computer, and translate them in the imperative: Obre, Edita, Desa and Esborra.
Yeah, I mean we have been doing work for these systems. We’re all basically data entry for a giant database that ends up I suppose getting mined for value and maybe producing AI.
That was Larry pages Initial goal with Google anyway, his goal was to create an AI not a search engine, and the search engine was simply a means to that, I feel sad for him as seems like openai got there first.