The truth of this was revealed to some Microsoft researchers, who in the early days of Microsoft Word asked lots of people to send them their configuration files. These were anonymous, because the researchers just wanted to find out what people actually preferred, so they could have those set as the defaults. To their amazement, they discovered that less than 5% had made any changes. At all. Even though there was a fantastically useful autosave feature but it was off by default. Why? Because a programmer inside Microsoft had set the configuration file to all zeroes for simplicity. And “zero” in the config file meant “no autosave”.
There’s a joke in technology circles about how programmers don’t understand how non-programmers use computers. Daring Fireball used to have a “UI of the Week” feature that linked to UI atrocities that only a programmer could love. It’s true that not every piece of software needs to be as sexily designed as a piece of Apple hardware. There’s nothing wrong with a utility looking like one. It’s just one small symptom of a larger problem in computing as more and more ordinary people embrace technology.
Joel Marsh claims that Google and Microsoft “don’t understand people.” This is an understatement. [1]Most technology companies don’t understand people. Often, it’s that their focus isn’t on the person who actually uses the software every day. Episode 39 and episode 40 of Accidental Tech Podcast go on deep dives into why so much Enterprise software is awful. In short, they’re selling on features to people who don’t have to use it. There’s no incentive make the user interface better, because it won’t move more units. Apple doesn’t get a free pass here, either. By all accounts, their back end for app developers and content creators to get stuff in people’s hands is downright awful. There’s also no incentive to make it better, because it’s clearly not keeping people from putting apps on the store and music on iTunes.
If only this problem were limited to enterprise software and tools for programmers. Apps that add new features because they looks good on a press release, companies getting into “social” because that’s the buzzword of the week [2], trendy redesigns that impede usability, and forcibly integrating unpopular new products into popular old ones, all of these are symptoms of not understanding people. Even worse, it’s thinking of people as eyeballs to monetize or wallets to pry open. Thinking about this problem, I come back to Tab Closed; Didn’t Read. The pattern of obscuring content with subscription boxes and social media buttons is exploiting a specific sort of knowledge about people. It’s a lazy technique that makes product guys think they’re doing something with a measurable benefit while frustrating people. Worse, it’s not a big leap to go from newsletter subscription boxes to popups that pretend to be system dialogs reporting fake system errors. Behaviors like this are common enough that they have a name: Dark Patterns.
Fundamentally, people approach technology from a task-oriented mindset. They sit down at their computer, or take out their smartphone because they want to do something: share their thoughts with their friends, buy a pair of socks, or fling cartoon birds at cartoon pigs. It’s the job of the technology to let them to do that thing they want to do with the least amount of fuss. It’s why iOS is still built around an incredibly simple grid of icons. If you want to share your thoughts with friends or fling cartoon birds around, you just touch. Apple builds its experience around reducing friction. To do such a thing, however, requires a willingness to understand the real human motivations and real human frustrations that come when trying to accomplish a task with technology.
The underlying reason for all of this? Most technology companies haven’t had to live in the consumer space until recently. It wasn’t until the Internet took off in the mid–90s that personal computers took off in the home among ordinary people. By this point, most of the companies in the space had fossilized around a business and design model that focused on business users and the odd hobbyist who wanted to learn how to use a computer for fun. (I was the second type.) It’s the enterprise software problem writ large, and companies are scrambling to learn how normal people think and use computers. Most of them aren’t doing a very good job of it.
Marsh does make a lot of great points in his piece, though I think his criticism of the original gMail interface is a little off the mark. It may not have been pretty, but it was usable as all hell. ↩
What we’re witnessing here is the first wave of the second world pop-up war. Those of us who lived through the first one can only describe the horrors to our disbelieving children. This time though, the pop-ups are winning because we don’t yet have the tools to fight back. The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?
Andy Beaumont just launched Tab Closed; Didn’t Read, a blog collecting the worst abuses of obscuring content with newsletter subscription forms, app promotions, or any other awful crap that gets in the way between the reader and what they came to see. Naturally, some people are confused and angry, because those tools “work.” They get “conversions,” measured in signups, follows, or whatever miserable metric they’re trying to juice.
This behavior shows a complete disrespect for your audience. It’s the digital equivalent of a store having people shove coupons and flyers in your face as you enter. The difference is that in real life, it’s easy to avoid them, or just trash what they hand you. Online, most people don’t know how to escape, short of capitulation. And it’s ruining how we use the web.
Once a simple MP3 player, it’s become the center of the Mac ecosphere, the location where our computers interface with the sprawling multimedia iTunes Store, the launch pad for Apple’s increasingly important iTV gambit, and the place where we, our media libraries, and our computers, iPhones, iPads, and iPods all link up. And in the process it has become a terrible MP3 player.
iTunes has issues, yes, but the ones singled out in Raymer’s short piece, save one, are cheap shots and not Apple’s fault. If your “legally acquired music” doesn’t have proper metadata, it’s not Apple’s fault, and iTunes doesn’t need to help you fix it. I have a massive media library in iTunes, with 183 GB of music, and another 22 GB of video, plus apps. I haven’t had any slowdown issues with iTunes 11, even on my old white MacBook with 4GB of RAM. And Visualizers? Who cares.
While there’s plenty of bugs to squash, including the annoying Album Artist bug that can lead to two instances of an album in your library with different track listings, I’ve found each version of iTunes to be a dramatic improvement over its predecessor. Including iTunes 11 after I changed the search back to the previous functionality. iTunes for Mac is easily one of the best music players I’ve used, and I go back to the WinAmp days myself. (Rest in peace.)
If you want valid criticisms of iTunes, you can’t do better than John Siracusa on Hypercritical episode 98 and episode 99. John at least knows what he’s talking about, and won’t make a mistake of calling Apple’s TV product “iTV.”
Ian Bogost recently published a commentary on “Hyperemployment” in The Atlantic. It starts with the de rigeur comments on how we get too much email, then moves on to the obligations we’ve opted into through social media—especially Facebook. It would seem like the typical curmudgeonly ramblings of anti-Internet/social media types, until this part:
Often, we cast these new obligations either as compulsions (the addictive, possibly dangerous draw of online life) or as necessities (the importance of digital contact and an “online brand†in the information economy). But what if we’re mistaken, and both tendencies are really just symptoms of hyperemployment?
I don’t consider posting on Facebook and Twitter to be exploitation, but the necessity of building a personal online brand is something worth discussing. As someone who is in the middle of job hunting, it certainly hits home. Job hunting in the age of social media is job hunting in the age of utmost scrutiny. It’s not uncommon for prospective employers to scour a candidate’s social media profiles. I did it myself when evaluating summer interns at my previous job. On Episode 41 of QUIT!, Haddie Cooke mentions a college professor who made one of their final class days “Facebook cleanup day,” and recounts a frightening story of what happened to a student who decided to skip it.
This goes way beyond not having pictures of yourself smoking weed on your Facebook. Even the already employed in some fields have to keep up a social presence, along with their actual work. Mimi Thi Nguyen is an academic in the digital humanities and writes that:
To remain relevant [in academia], we are told we must blog, tweet, and code (whether this means learning genetic and neurobiological chemical formulas or computing languages). But it is important to ask, To what end?
Your social media profiles, your passion projects, the internships—paid, and unpaid—you take to get skills, all of these things become your personal brand, and the personal brand subsumes all. Maintaining your personal brand is a full-time job in itself. Vulture posted an interesting piece by Joe Jonas of The Jonas Brothers on the difficulties of living in the spotlight under the Disney brand that offers an interesting perspective on personal branding. It’s not quite that insane for the majority of us. There’s a reason Disney has a team of people to handle the hard work of brushing indiscretions under the rug. It’s just that the rest of us have to keep up our own appearances.
As Ian Bogost writes:
Today, everyone’s a hustler. But now we’re not even just hustling for ourselves or our bosses, but for so many other, unseen bosses. For accounts payable and for marketing; for the Girl Scouts and the Youth Choir; for Facebook and for Google; for our friends via their Kickstarters and their Etsy shops…
My personal brand got me my last job. [1] Having Sanspoint and Crush On Radio showed that I had the skills needed for the role I would take on, and could teach myself new ones. A few months ago, I considered shuttering Sanspoint and starting a new project to focus on my technology and culture writing. As I thought about starting from scratch, building a new audience, a new brand, I realized, first, how integrated this little blog was with my online identity. I’d have to do a lot more than just buy a new domain and set up a new WordPress installation. I’d have to build my personal brand all over again, and that is hard. It’s even harder when you’re already employed.
But is all of this hyperemployment and brand building exploitive? One reason why I was poking and prodding at the Facebook profiles of prospective interns is that they would be publicly representing the company on social media. If they know how to manage their own profiles well, it shows they would know how to manage a business’s profile just as well. It’s a skill, one they don’t teach in school (yet), and not every job requires it. There are still plenty of jobs where what you do outside of office hours simply do not, and should not matter, as long as it doesn’t affect your on the job performance. Why should they have to worry about their online persona and brand?
And what about those who opt-out? We may see people abandoning “traditional” social media in the future. If Snapchat and other temporary sharing services have staying power, how will its users build their brands? Even today, there’s still plenty of people in the first world who don’t use any of this stuff, or use it only sporadically. In 2011, 40% of active Twitter users didn’t tweet, according to an interview with Dick Costolo. Can a personal brand be an absence thereof?
My personal brand also lost my last job. Saying that might keep me from another job, but I think an important part of who I am, online and offline, is based on honesty and a sense of ethics. ↩
