I wanna expand on this a bit because it was a rush job.
This part...
Learning AI and Building on chain start with deciding which product you’re going to base your learning/building on and which products you’re going to learn to achieve that. Something that has no stability and never will.
...is a bit wrong. The AI environment has no stability now because it's a mess of products fighting for sensationalist attention. But if it ever gains stability, as in there being a single starting point for learning AI, it will be because a product, or a brand, won. You'll be learning a product just like people learned Flash.
Seeing people in here talk about CoPilot or ChatGPT and examples of how they have found it useful is exactly why we're going to find ourselves in a situation where software products discourage any kind of unconventional or experimental ways of doing things. Coding isn't a clean separation between mundane, repetitive, pattern-based, automatable tasks and R&D style, hacking, or inventiveness. It's a recipe for applying the "wordpress theme" problem to everything where the stuff you like to do, where your creativity drives you, becomes a living hell. Like trying to customise a wordpress theme to do something it wasn't designed to do.
The stories of chatgpt helping you out of a bind are the exact stories that companies like openAI will let you tell to advertise for them, but they'll never go all in on making their product really good at those things because then you'll be able to point at them and say "ahah! it can't do this stuff!"
Haha they are, in fact, solutions that solve potential problems. They aren't searching for problems but they are searching for people to believe that the problems they solve are going to happen if they don't use AI.
I expect the AI-driven UX boom to happen in 2025, but I could be wrong on the specific year, as per Saffo’s Law. If AI-UX does happen in 2025, we’ll suffer a stifling lack of UX professionals with two years of experience designing and researching AI-driven user interfaces. (The only way to have two years of experience in 2025 is to start in 2023, but there is almost no professional user research and UX design done with current AI systems.) Two years is the bare minimum to develop an understanding of the new design patterns and user behaviors that we see in the few publicly available usability studies that have been done. (A few more have probably been done at places like Microsoft and Google, but they aren’t talking, preferring to keep the competitive edge to themselves.)
"learn AI now" is interesting in how much it is like the crypto "build it on chain" and how they are both different from something like "learn how to make a website".
Learning AI and Building on chain start with deciding which product you're going to base your learning/building on and which products you're going to learn to achieve that. Something that has no stability and never will. It's like saying "learn how to paint" because in the future everyone will be painting. It doesn't matter if you choose painting pictures on a canvas or painting walls in houses or painting cars, that's a choice left up to you.
"Learn how to make a website" can only be done on the web and, in the olden days, only with HTML.
"Learn AI now", just like "build it on chain" is nothing but PR to make products seem like legitimised technologies.
Oh I have to watch it now. A terrible early-2000s era British theatrical interpretation of a startup in the dot com boom? Apparently criticised for excessive sexual content!
I only just noticed this is the website for a digital agency. It makes a bit more sense in that context. It's not right, but it's the kind of stuff that suits sell to suits who think people love their product so much that they want a scrollytelling* experience to learn more about it
*I learned this word last week and I love it so much - chef's kiss coporate marketing delusion
the shift from the hamburger menu is because the scrollbar disappears. They could easily fix this by making the :root {width: 100dvw} which makes it 100% dynamic width - meaning it ignores browser elements like scrollbars.
but the site is drupal so there's a good chance this is a modified theme
I use an iOS app called Toot! and it does something special that helped me realise a distinction from sites like this.
The Toot app has all this weird stuff in there, none of which gets in the way, none of which serves any purpose, it's just weird. For example if you click on the action menu in a user profile it has an option "scan user" which plays a cheesy robot-view style scan animation over the page. Or if you unfollow someone, their avatar animates out of the bottom of the screen like a ghostly soul leaving the body.
Anyway, in UX design there is always talk about things like "micro animations" like elastic movement of scrollable items, subtle parallaxing, etc incorporated into the ui interactions. They talk about "conversational ui" where all of the text is conversational - "oh no, there are no results for your search!..." kinda bullshit. The idea being that you are brightening up a user's day, bringing delight, and all that shit. This all ignores the hard truth that craigslist still works fine. But that's beside the point.
The distinction, I think, between these two things is warmth and coldness. Toot! is a capable but otherwise standard masto client, it's actually a bit confusing to navigate in some places - but it's got that thing where you can tell it's a small team who have fun making it - the effect is a bit like contagious laughter. On the other hand you have the UX designed, orderly implementations of fun that don't give you any indication that the thing was made by people. That's where the coldness comes from and I don't think that even registers as a factor among the people who talk about "human-centeredness" in design. Not just that you're designing for people, because why the fuck do you need to be reminded of that, but that the person(s) making something should leave some imprint of their work in that thing.
This is similar in philosophy to the physical products that show signs of use over time. Instead of putting the imprint of the makers in the mass-produced thing, they let the thing collect the imprints of the owner/user so they see themselves in it. Like early macbook pros with thin aluminium shells rather than the modern solid unibody, they collected dents over time.
I don't buy into the trope of IKEA furniture having this effect because you "build it yourself" btw. That's marketing bullshit that ignores the fact that IKEA sells because it's cheap as fuck and you can furnish a room with one trip in your hatchback. Big item garbage pick-up days should be called IKEA garbage pick-up day.
so yeah. This site is an example of coldness via simulated warmth.
Reading back, this sounds a bit unhinged