100% of interactions with phones are miserable
and infuriating.
And I don't mean other people on social
media, I mean smartphones themselves.
Let me share with you my UX Design
Manifesto.
Ready?
Are you all prepared to take notes?
Get out of the user's fucking way!
Thank you for attending my TED Talk, video over.
No, alright, I'll elaborate.
There is, or could be, technology that exists
to be a means to an end.
Instead, software in [█̴̢̨͔̫̗͖̝͓̮̦̰͕͓̙̠̱̦͔̫̈́̽̒̊█̷̧̡̺͈̼̣̻͍̙̺̹͉̼̬̟͓̟̙͗̽̃̃̅͂̏͜͝█̷̡̨̛͕̜͈̼̞̩̙͔̺͙̦̻̰̦̹̟̟͇̖͔̱̓̔̂̅̃͋͊̍̍̊͐͊̐͋͑̈́̒͘̕͜͜͝͝█̷̡̢͍̯͚̱̲̜̳̭̺͉̜̯̺͙͈̳̜̫̑͑͆̐̃́̄͌͗̾̈́̈́͊͆͋̏̌͒͜͝͠͝͠█̴̢̥̗̣̦̮̜̙̯͉̦͖̙̟̍͌̿̀͊̊̈͂̾̅̚ͅ█̵̡̡̛͕̜̞̥͚̝̺̞̤͎͙͔̗̦̝͍̪̜̗͓̓͂̅̀͆͐█̵̡̛̼̲͓͓̙̩͉͔̘̀͂͗̈́̆̔͗͆̔̓̌͗̑̽͑̚͝͠ͅ█̷̢̡̗͎̘̙̰͓̮̽̔̾͝█̸̛̗̝̅̇̂̂́͗̂̍͌̌̚͠͝ͅ█̷̨̣̥̭̜͔͖͋̎]̴͖̹̹͋̾̃͠͠ͅ]
is entirely an exercise and being an obstacle.
I'll break it down to some rules.
Software is a means to an end.
But app developers think they're crafting an ℯ𝓍𝓅ℯ𝓇𝒾ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ.
They want to *increase* the time spent in an app.
I assume this is favorable for ad revenue metrics.
For those of us who actually do things,
an app is a tool.
And a tool is better when it *decreases*
the time it takes to get shit done.
Take, for example, Discord.
They've given themselves loads of work to produce
features to justify asking you for money.
Meanwhile, it only exists in the first place
because Skype was bloated full of junk.
All the extra stuff makes the app slower.
I get it.
Groceries and servers are expensive.
Nevertheless, their addiction to progress is harming their
product.
The entire world of technology is mislabeled.
The definition of technology is about applying knowledge
to achieve practical goals.
It's far more profitable to hide the fact
that your only actual goal is extracting value
from the people who ostensibly should be your
customers.
That's why the only practical goal to achieve
at the moment is adversarial APIs.
We don't need yet another skin on your
phone's built-in music player.
We need the possibility for your phone to
install new audio codecs and an ecosystem of it.
Accursed Farms has inspiration on how to build
better UIs.
“It should be like a butler that's ready
at a moment's notice and disappears when you
don't need them anymore.”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Perfect.”
Let's learn the lesson that Clippy's
project managers didn't.
We already anthropomorphize our technology.
We should spend less effort having it pretend
to be our friend and more effort making
it useful.
Do what you can and no less.
This one is a well-known one from
our predecessors.
Greybeards from before even myself.
They said that The Linux Way is to
do only one thing and do it well.
Or as the world's favorite libertarian would say,
Never half-ass two things.
Whole-ass one thing.
Example, GPS.
You know why people put up with Google's
tracking?
Because for as much dumb bullshit as Waze
is laden with, for as wrong as Apple
is, and for as much as Google Maps
is a thinly veiled excuse for Google to
catalog your GPS position down to the meter
and second, those three are the only apps that
offer driving directions and
understand the concept of a road.
Keep left onto exit 28N toward
I-395 north, Providence then in 50 feet.
Keep right.
Keep right onto exit 28N toward
I-395 north, Providence then in 50 feet.
Again, what is the function of a GPS app?
To tell you where you are and how
to get somewhere.
So the concept of a street map and
navigation app that doesn't understand the concept of
a street and therefore is effectively unable to
navigate it is absurd.
Do what you can and no more.
Again, focus on your function.
Whole-ass one thing.
Confucius said, To go beyond is as wrong
as to fall short.
Or if you prefer, Dr. Ian Malcolm said,
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or
not they could, they didn't stop to think
if they should.”
So ask.
Should you?
For example, keyboards on laptops.
My laptop, much like every single other laptop
I have ever seen within the last 15
years, is the least bad design I could
find.
Laptop keyboards are universally moronic.
As a person who understands the concept of
a file, I habitually save often.
Looking at my keyboard, the place where many
years of muscle memory have trained me to
hit the control key, there's an Fn key
instead, and the control key is moved over
to where I expect the Windows key.
fn+S is screenshot.
Cinnamon's screenshot app has a white flash effect,
so I flashbang myself often.
Apparently, if you design a laptop keyboard, a
prerequisite is some kind of brain damage that
makes you think people want all kinds of
bullshit instead of the keys on a keyboard.
Fortunately, mine was able to be set once
to let the keys do what they're supposed
to do.
However, on my black keyboard, illuminated by my
mostly black screen with a couple of points
of extremely bright LEDs, I can see the
unnecessary functions' white labels, and the actual F-key labels have a dark blue one.
No one wants to chat with your "AI".
The current state-of-the-art of
"AI" manages to both not do what
it should do and do so much more
stuff rather than what it should.
But it's such a problem, it deserves to
be ranted about for a million and first time.
Microsoft being so large that they have so
much money that they taught us you're allowed
to just buy a nuclear power plant,
of course is sinking all of their money and
none of their brain power into the current
thing everyone hates.
Have you heard the tale of Clippy?
Way back, some cutting-edge psychological research was
done that demonstrated people anthropomorphize their computers and
hate them like they would hate a person.
“But then the great mistake was made, which
is, well, if people react to computers as
though they're people, we have to put the
faces of people on computers, which in my
opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction.”
“If people are going to react to computers
as though they're humans, the one thing you
don't have to do is anthropomorphize them
because they're already using that part of the brain.”
“Clippy...
was a program based on the research
that Nass and Reeves did and it was
a tragic misinterpretation of their work.”
So some cufflink-wearing motherfuckers said, great, people
will emotionally connect with their computer more favorably
if we anthropomorphize it.
Now you start up your word processor and
it jumps in the way to say hi
and chat about how it can interfere.
Fortunately, Clippy was killed off pretty quickly.
As long as people are projecting a personality
onto their computer, we hated Clippy as intensely
as we'd hate any other pest.
And of course, there are some people who
felt the opposite.
I'll leave a link in the show notes
to an erotic fan fiction starring Clippy that
you can actually buy.
Microsoft eventually came to their senses
and euthanized Clippy.
Then a few years later, they bought Halo.
Once that story concluded, some idiot at Microsoft
figured they could try again to make Clippy
happen as Cortana.
Years pass.
The most glorified Markov chain in the world
conquers society.
Cortana is dead.
Now Microsoft will make you love Copilot.
Remember how they tripped over their own dick
right out of the gate by starting at
step one with a feature that automatically screenshots
your credit card details and passwords?
Oh, good times.
Recently, they're preparing to roll it out again,
this time assuring us it's opt-in only.
Given their track record of accidentally forgetting that
a user didn't opt in, I don't think
anyone's going to be surprised when they forget
again.
Work with the user.
As opposed to against the user.
Honestly, it's amazing how much is out there
working against the user, but still has users.
The dominant social networks are all infamous for
messing with your timeline.
The timeline is their whole function.
But I've already complained about that.
question: how do you automate your phone?
If you try and do some research online,
both sides of the walled gardens have a
plethora of stupid ways to decrease your productivity
of automating other stuff from your phone.
But since your phone is the nexus of
your security and identity, you aren't allowed to
let anything go poking around in it.
So there is almost no concept of automating
a phone.
And therefore, you'll have to pull up Davx
and hit refresh manually.
You're begrudgingly allowed to install apps without Google's
or Apple's blessing through third-party app stores,
but you may not automatically update them.
Because no one likes ads, if you're a
professional marketer, you market yourself on the grounds
that you can make a stronger impression, which
means making your ads more intrusive.
Everyone hates ads.
Everyone hates pop-up ads much more because
they pop up.
I would have thought this was obvious both
experientially and tautologically.
And yet...
So in the extremely rare event that a
person searches the wider internet for something to
buy, and the even more rare event that
they find a good result, they might read
the webpage.
Imagine the audacity it takes to stop someone
from trying to give you money to ask
them to participate in some extraneous junk.
gabi belle: "Get out of here!"
The Digital Markets Act of 2022 in the
EU granted advertising corporations the right to view
the data they've generated, the right to take
their data to other platforms.
In other words, big tech gatekeepers don't get
to lay claim to advertisers and treat them
like property.
It demonstrates we all know interoperability is great
and enclosure is bad, but only shareholders, people
don't get the same.
When making a useful tool, interoperability is the
most important thing.
Before praising AI, before praising the iPhone, society
loved that the internet connected everyone together.
We had a futurist optimism that ideas and
communication could flow, making the world a better
place and building great things.
That didn't happen though.
Now when you try to get two technologies
to work together, they do what they can
to inhibit you.
Gmail does not like when you try to
use a different mail client, perhaps one with
a working spam filter.
Cars used to be forced to use a
standard headlight, but naturally that was lobbied to
death.
Be transparent.
They say knowledge is power, which explains why
businesses obfuscate as much as possible from their
users.
Ask any doctor how much anything costs, they
don't know.
Ask any mechanic how much something would cost,
they don't know.
Yet they expect you to agree to be
on the hook to pay an amount they'll
decide later.
Hidden information is bad.
Software should have observability for itself during development,
and you might as well provide that same
observability to your users while you're at it.
Apple says phones just work, so the world
keeps the faith.
When something doesn't work, if there are logs,
good luck finding them.
On a real computer, if the whole thing
is FUBAR, you can reformat and start from
scratch.
If your Emacs configuration is out of control,
you can do the same.
Declare Emacs bankruptcy.
But if your phone appears to be haunted,
shrug, throw it in the trash, and buy
a new one.
Let's not retread what Apple hath wrought against
the right to repair.
Security theater has a lot of overlap with
other problems.
Most often, lying about security is the excuse
for user hostility.
Surely I don't have to remind you that
flying is a nightmare, almost entirely for one
reason, the TSA, which is undeniably purely security
theater.
Meanwhile, in the US, where the shoe bomber
was headed for all the effort they put
into telling you that their petty rituals of
dominance are for your protection, they missed
70% of test weapons.
In 2008, when the TSA felt they weren't
getting the respect they entitled themselves to, they
switched their uniforms to look exactly like police
officers.
Okay, TSA tangent over, back to nerd shit.
Websites are afraid of DDoS attacks.
A web server is a fallible thing that
can only deliver so much.
But that isn't why a disgusting number of
websites block VPNs, as evidenced by the fact
that they give you a professionally styled front
-end web page saying they'll let you read
if you sign in.
Conform to known paradigms.
You know how a save icon is a
floppy disk?
That type of storage media is so old,
I bet if you're listening to this, you
physically can't use it.
But the association has stuck.
You know how on mobile, the menu of
all your options is probably three parallel horizontal
lines, a.k.a. the hamburger menu?
Another association that everyone just went with.
IRL, this extends much further.
Red light means stop, green light means go.
So when you have an action that could
be destructive, you color code it red.
And when something is constructive, you color code
it green.
These associations are arbitrary.
But since they're there, we keep them.
Can you touch type?
Imagine I presented you with a blank keyboard.
You'd still be able to type due to
a lifetime of training.
Prime example, recent episode of LTT had them
forcing Android on some iPhone users.
To summarize, there's a circle with a symbol
in it, and surprise, it doesn't respond to
being tapped like every other button it wants
you to drag sideways.
"the camera button on the lock screen."
“Yeah”
“It looks like a button so you go to click it
and nothing would happen."
"to me, if you want somebody to swipe,
you do something that makes
it look like you go to swipe.
It's a meme that we've all learned.
If something is wrong, you press it.”
Allow customization.
There's a wise comment
on that Accursed Farms video.
“coming back to this now that windows 11 is out...
imagine being able to move the taskbar.
we had no idea how good we had it back then.”
Why can't you move the taskbar in Windows 11?
So that it can look like OSX.
What is the only rationalization that Apple investors
have been giving for Apple's success?
That Apple has good taste in interface design.
Apple insists that their UX is good because
of the decisions they've made for it.
“We're trying to make great products for people.”
When Apple speaks, the rest of the world
obeys.
So customization options are viewed as less and
less important.
Not to mention, if you're stopped from customization,
for example, modding in some armor for your
horse, now it's something that can be sold
to you instead.
Companies love to dumb everything down, and in
response to criticism, blame it on a hypothetical
group of lowest common denominator people.
This way, you're not presented with the ability
to customize.
It's moved behind a paywall.
But the whole premise that customization is inessential
is wrong.
Normal is not a valid target.
The Air Force learned this in the 40s.
“At its worst point, 17 pilots crashed in a single day.”
“After multiple inquiries ended with no answers,
officials turned their attention to the design of the cockpit itself.”
“To obtain an updated assessment of pilot dimensions,
the air force authorized the largest study of
pilots that had ever been undertaken.”
“Out of 4,063 pilots,
not a single airman fit within the
average range on all 10 dimensions.
If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot,
you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.”
And finally, a short list of features that
you know goddamn well no one wants.
No one wants to sign up for your
newsletter.
You aren't interesting enough to fill one out.
Just get the stupid notification out of the way.
Scrolling is not an ℯ𝓍𝓅ℯ𝓇𝒾ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ,
every vehicle website ever.
Onboarding is at best a necessary evil.
The worst UX anti-pattern emerged a while ago.
It picks a permitted subset of functionality, moves
it away from anywhere it could interoperate with
other systems, entitles itself to priority over what
you're trying to look at so it can
be in front of your eyeballs.
It's everything people hate about pop-up ads,
but so commonly done that it gets enshrined
in UI libraries.
The floating action button.
It's a software screen notch.
The pinnacle of getting in the way.
So, again, get out of the user's way.