Another video / audio / thread from me

This time it's about products that are marketed with purposes they can't be optimised for.

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In the production of a tech product an "edge case" is seen as a hindrance to delivering on the core purpose of the product.

For marketing an "edge case" can be seen as an opportunity to exploit a purpose that the product was not designed for and will never be optimised to satisfy.

When a general purpose product uses an edge case as the subject of its marketing it ignores the other aspects of the product which, for that niche purpose, will be on a spectrum from irrelevance to interference.

A product capable of servicing a niche purpose is not the same as a product designed to specifically satisfy that niche purpose.

Only the latter will be developed with continual effort to further satisfy the purpose as effectively as possible.

The more general purpose a product is, the more perceived edge cases it has.

Every edge case is a candidate for edge-case marketing which exploits the virtues of serving that niche in order to sell the entire product along with everything else it includes.

I didn't think this is techtakesworthy, nor is it a sneer, more a airing of perspective, as wanky as that sounds

The gist: Software, or generally computation, can be categorised as a type of building material rather than a type of product in itself.

This framing opens up the view that design within the software industry begins with an assumption that software was the best means for the supposed purpose.

Foundationally, design is the deliberation over the best means to satisfy a given purpose. In reality most design projects begin with limitations to the means available.

Regardless, the knowledge that software is one of many possible means should not be ignored.

To accept "software is eating the world" as a positive movement is to skip the most important choice of any design process. The means that best satisfies the given purpose at that point in time.

The same ignorance of that choice led to plastic eating the world as well.

The means for satisfying a purpose are not limited to building materials. It can be any effort that influences a situation rather than building a thing, physical or virtual.

The goal is to have as open a design process as possible to allow for the most appropriate means to be discovered.

Also audio available here: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/63b3904b/software-as-material

vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbw1GlyzNu4

audio only/podcast version: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/6d394145/do-less-products

I talk about an idea I've been throwing around for a while for a "typewriter OS" which boots an old laptop into text editor (as a starting project to hopefully lead to a [insert single purpose] OS)

It's a difficult thing to pitch because it's very easy to say "that's just X running Y" type of answers. But it's something I see as a ground up build by design.

Anyway, sharing to see if it piques anyone's interest

I just published this on our new WriteFreely instance. It's a write-directly-into-the-cms-and-hit-publish job that took an hour. It's about the difference between the purpose of a thing and the purpose of the ux designers who work on that thing.

P.S. I skim proof read it. So expect weird gibberish (ha)

invidious link https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=OkfzjmY9cF8

He has sample photos starting around 12 minute mark - the colour tone he's getting is amazing

Example:

!Colour photo of piled up old computers and computer peripherals from the grey/beige era. The colours are muted but not completely desaturated. It resembles film more than the average post-processed digital photo

I just want to share a little piece of this provocation, but would like to know how compelling it sounds? I've been sitting on it for a while and starting to think its probably not earning that much space in words. The overarching point is that anyone who complains about constraints imposed on them as being constraints in general either isn't making something purposeful enough to concretely challenge the constraints or isn't actually designing because they haven't done the hard work of understanding the constraints between them and their purpose. Anyway, this is a snippet from a longer piece which leads to a point that the scumbags didn't take over, but instead the environment evolved to create the perfect habitat for scumbags who want to make money from providing as little value as possible:

> The constraints of taking up space

> Software was once sold on physical media packaged in boxes that were displayed with price tags on shelves alongside competing products in brick and mortar stores.

> Limited shelf space stifled software makers into making products innovative enough to earn that shelf space.

> The box that packaged the product stifled software makers into having a concrete purpose for their product which would compel more interest than the boxes beside it.

> The price tag stifled software makers into ensuring that the product does everything it says on the box.

> The installation media stifled software makers into making sure their product was complete and would function.

> The need to install that software, completely, on the buyer’s computer stifled the software makers further into delivering on the promises of their product.

> The pre-broadband era stifled software makers into ensuring that any updates justified the time and effort it would take to get the bits down the pipe.

> But then…

> Connectivity speeds increased, and always-on broadband connectivity became widespread. Boxes and installation media were replaced by online purchases and software downloads.

> Automatic updates reduced the importance of version numbers. Major releases which marked a haul of improvements significant enough to consider it a new product became less significant. The concept of completeness in software was being replaced by iterative improvements. A constant state of becoming.

> The Web matured with advancements in CSS and Javascript. Web sites made way for Web apps. Installation via downloads was replaced by Software-as-a-service. It’s all on a web server, not taking up any space on your computer’s internal storage.

> Software as a service instead of a product replaced the up-front price tag with the subscription model.

> …and here we are. All of the aspects of software products that take up space, whether that be in a store, in your home, on your hard disk, or in your bank account, are gone.

> Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft

> The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.

A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

> There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2. > >Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere. > >Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

I just read Naomi Klein's No Logo, and despite being so late to that party It's not hard to imagine how big an impact it had in its time at identifying the brand being the product more than the things the businesses made (*sold).

Because I'm always trying to make connections that might not be there, I can't help think we're at a stage where "Brand" is being replaced by "UX" in a world of tech where you can't really wear brands on your shoulders.

We're inside the bubble so we talk in terms of brands (i.e. openAI) and personalities (sama), which are part of brand really, but outside of the bubble the UX is what gets people talking.

When you think about Slack doing their AI dataset shit, you can really see how much their product is a product of UX, or fashion, that could easily be replaced by a similar collection of existing properties.

As I write this, I already wonder if UX is just another facet of brand or if it's a seperate entity.

Anyway, I'm writing this out as a "is this a thing?" question. WDYR?

This is not so much about a particular post but rather to document Jakob Nielsen's relentless generative AI boosting.

His weekly updates are so saturated with AI subject matter and every image is AI generated they are unreadable and I can only assume the text is AI generated as well. It really doesn't matter if it isn't, in fact, because he's demonstrating in real-time how damaging the AI aesthetic is to a brand.

He also seems to be mentioning his 40 years of expertise a lot more, which might be a reaction to some negative feedback. I want to dig deeper, but I don't like the feeling that I'll have to read generated stuff carefully.

His latest newsletter triggered this post because he links to a terrible AI generated song he made (with the line "Jakob Nielsen with UX fame, forty-one years, still in the game") and spends most of the newsletter talking about the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYt12jr5yUY

replaced with essay of lament by creator.

My only hot take: a thing being x amount of good for y amount of people is not justification enough for it to exist despite it being z amount of bad for var amount of people.

I don’t really have much to say… it kind of speaks for itself. I do appreciate the table of contents so you don’t get lost in the short paragraphs though

I think I giggled all the way through this one.

> Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.

> Gabor Cselle, Pebble’s CEO, says this and generative AI features to come will enable a kinder, safer, and more fun experience. “We want to make sure that you see great content, that you're posting great content, and that you're interacting with the community,” he says.

How is it "kinder, safer, and more fun"?

> Cselle says he recognizes the perils of offering AI-generated text to users, and that users are free to edit or ignore the suggestions. “We don’t want a situation where bots masquerade as humans and the entire platform is just them talking to each other,” he says.

> To protect the integrity of the community as it throws open the door to over 300 million people, Pebble will also be using generative AI to vet new signups. The system will use OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to compare the X bio and recent posts of people against Pebble’s community guidelines, which in contrast to Musk’s service ban all nudity and violent content.

> Pebble CTO Mike Greer says the aim is to determine “whether someone is fundamentally toxic and treats other people poorly.” Those who are or do will be blocked and and manually reviewed. Pebble intends to vet would-be users against “other sources of truth” online once it opens signups further, he says, to include people without an X account.

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There are too many quotable passages, so I'll stop there.

My favourite thing about these products is how they want to take on giants with these differentiating features that would be trivial plug-ins for the giants if they were to pose any threat. It's common in the enterprise blockchain world as well. It'll take SAP much less time to figure out blockchain than it will for your shitty blockchain startup to work out whatever SAP is.

I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

> Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

Edit: Here's a recent interview with the creator Andreas Kling talking to Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about the browser https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

Edit 2: Here’s their August 2023 update video of the browser https://youtu.be/OEsRW3UFjA0

Edit 3: Looks like the project was recently sponsored $100k USD from Shopify https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor

It’s quite impressive!

Note: I don't know anything about the politics of the SerenityOS project or the people behind it.

The decentralised finance club needs to make their core values poster bigger and easier to understand

We’re here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of “not your keys not your wallet” is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank and the complexity that comes with that is unavoidable.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

But these people can’t make it useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will try the even lazier route of deceiving people into thinking it is simple.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/evanvar/status/1699032296870015232

edit: changed title to reduce keyword matches in lemmy fediverse searches

I always knew they had it in them, I just thought they'd ease into it a little

https://nitter.net/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728

> Laravel creator Taylor Otwell learned PHP in 2008

and then

> There were a few model-view-controller frameworks for PHP, some of which aimed to provide a "Rails-like" experience. But none was as comprehensive as Otwell wanted. So he built his own and released the first version in 2011.

Taylor Otwell seems like someone who gets design. I've used Laravel a little bit and I know what they mean when they say "opinionated" - but I think the word doesn't do justice to his confidence in his design.

Anyway, this article came up in my twitter feed yesterday and it made me happy to hear Laravel is going strong.

Here's Jared Spool talking about knowing who/what you are designing for as if it's a novel idea. This UX influencer opinion that being able to recognise that you're making something for people is some kind of UX skill superpower. Yet they never acknowledge the critical distinction between designing for-profit vs their usual non-commercial case study examples, like this one of a European government ministry.

Commercial design has always been somewhat dumb in how egotistical it is, but we're in a golden age of believing ones own bullshit where people think that UX is a force for good separate from whatever the UXer is being paid to do. In an ad agency, that kind of ignorance was usually isolated to the sales suits who snorted copious amounts of coke to cope with the internal anguish, while everyone else was comfortable with being paid a lot of money to make ads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230804073453/https://articles.centercentre.com/how-ux-outcomes-make-a-teams-daily-work-truly-human-centered/

Feedback types: Is this a thing? / challenging perspectives / general opinions

Here's an outline which I originally posted as a tweet thread but would like to flesh out into a fill article with images like the attached one to illustrate the "zones" that people may/may not realise they are acting in when they say stuff like "what's good for the user is good for the business"

I am writing this because I've published a few things now which say that empathy and "human centeredness" in commercial design, particularly UX design/research, are theatrical and not compatible with capitalism if done deliberately. That means they can be true as a side-effect, or by individuals acting under the radar of their employers. It has become common to hear the good for the user = good for the business response - and I want to write something that demonstrates how it is an incomplete sentence, and any way to add the necessary information to make it true results in the speaker admitting they are not acting in the interests of users or humans.

Here's the basic outline so far:

What’s good for the User

"What's good for the user is good for the business" is a common response I get to my UX critique. When I try to understand the thinking behind that response I come up with two possible conclusions:

Conclusion 1: They are ignoring the underlying product and speaking exclusively about the things between the product and a person. They are saying that making anything easy to use, intuitive, pleasant, makes a happy user and a happy user is good for business.

This type of "good for the user" is a business interest that values engagement over ethics. It justifies one-click purchases of crypto shitcoins, free drinks at a casino, and self-lighting cigarettes. https://patents.google.com/patent/US1327139

Conclusion 2: They are speaking exclusively about the underlying product and the purposes it was created to serve. They say a good product will benefit the business. But this means they are making a judgement call on what makes a product “good”.

This type of “good for the user” is complicated because it is a combination of objective and subjective consideration of each product individually. It is design in its least reductive form because the creation of something good is the same with or without business interests.

A designer shouldn’t use blanket statements agnostic to the design subject. “what is good for the user…” ignores cigarette packet health warnings and poker machine helpline stickers there because of enforced regulation, not because of a business paying designers to create them.

It’s about being aware of the context, intent, and whose interests are being served. It means cutting implied empathy for people if it is bullshit.

If we look at this cartesian plane diagram we can see the blue and green quadrants that corporate product design operates in. The green being where the "good for user, good for business" idea exists, and the yellow representing the area that the idea ignores, dismisses, etc

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A couple artefacts from my personal pocket of dislike for the company:

Google dot com used table layout components till feb 2022 - something that has been semantically incorrect since forever.

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Google's Web.dev, a stealth advertising project disguised as a developer community, has poor accessibility test results—on AXE and it's own Lighthouse test—where developer.mozilla.org scores 100% on Lighthouse and passes with minor issues in AXE tests.

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