Words Matter in Interfaces

Visual design is powerful, but the words are what people quote to one another.
And they are the only part of the design that survives across time and media types. They can be held intact in a human mind.
Erika Hall

Source

As soon as I read this quote on Joshua’s blog, I thought about my reluctance to use Snapchat. I once had a conversation with someone who is an ardent user of the social network and after explaining a few basics of the app to me, he grew weary of my inane questions and simply said, “if you’d been with the app since the beginning, this would not feel weird to you.”

Indeed, I see it as this – visual design needs a lot of historical context to understand. If you’ve seen it evolve over time, you can understand it well. But if you are dropped into it anew, it’s all strange and confusing to you. A new user might even be scared of clicking things, if they have no idea what they’re doing.

I love playing a game called Egg, Inc. For the first few months of playing the game, I would notice these cute little drones flying around. I thought they’re just an easter egg by the developer. Unrelated, I would notice that at random times, my resources would shoot up, by random values which made no sense to me.

While reading a post on reddit one time, I discovered that you’re supposed to smack those drones out of the air. See, in the game, you’re running a chicken farm, and you believe those drones are a violation of your space, so you can shoot them down, for a reward. Sometimes, fast moving drones appear and shooting them down is difficult but awards you with an exponential value. All of this would be in the onboarding, but I can never recall there being a specific time when I was told to hit the drones. In a way, that is an easter egg – you’re supposed to discovered on your own that those cute flying objects are actually an annoyance to your character and shooting them is the right thing to do. But I felt betrayed. How many months had I wasted not knowing about this growth hack?

I can’t expect a game of all things to label everything. The elegant interface of Egg, Inc, would only be made more clunky by the addition of ugly labels. But I can expect this from Snapchat. Their job is to make it easy for me to use their interface, specially if I’m a new user.

An interface made up entirely of swipes is revolutionary, but a hindrance to people who have not understood it from the beginning. The same is true for all visual design, and it’s worth remembering for everyone who is involved in the task of designing interfaces.

n.b. Notice how quickly Erika’s ideas were attacked by someone who puts more value in visual design than textual context. I would have expected people to have differing opinions about the topic, but one opinion doesn’t invalidate another. It’s an opinion, not a fact.

My wife asked me the other day – why do you use twitter? Isn’t it full of bile and anger? This is why. Great ideas are often posted to it, and inquisitive minds go where the water of knowledge is.

Security vs Usability

I’ve come to a point where I do **not** update apps, plugins, software in general. I know that’s a regressive approach to safety, but safety can’t keep trumping usability all the time.

Source: My comment on Stephen’s Notebook

Every few days, I have a conversation about security vs usability somewhere. With my iPad Mini, I blindly trusted Apple to do the right thing and they’ve screwed me over. It’s a beloved device, destroyed completely by iOS 9.

So I’ve basically given up on this bullshit harp that companies sing of ‘security’ to shove software updates down our throats. Sometimes it’s their stupidity, and sometimes it’s just them being sinister. The new Microsoft is the old Microsoft. The benevolent Apple is an insidious Apple. Don’t get me started on Facebook, twitter, and Google. Gmail is just the latest casualty of our overzealous overlords.

Yes, security is a big problem. Yes, it needs constant vigilance. But just like national defense budgets, one key phrase doesn’t allow organizations to completely railroad people’s expectations, asks, hopes, and in this case, UX.

If you’re concerned that by not updating software, you’re living on the edge, restrict the things you do on that device, while keeping other devices that are completely updated and secured. Use only frequently updated third party browsers instead of the default options. Read up on the latest security scares on the Internet and just be aware of the situations you can get into. But most importantly – back up. Make frequent backups of things you care about. I don’t care if it’s as much as letting iCloud run its course every night, and Google Photos siphoning off your pics. Just do it so that if you brick your device, or get hacked, you’re not set back a hundred years.

99% of security is just keeping your eyes open.

No Waze

So, I gave Waze a try after being a Google Maps user for a long time. I had enjoyed using Waze way back in 2012, when I drove all over California trusting this app.

But this time, it chose to disappoint. Routes keep changing arbitrarily. When I let Waze decide the route, more often than not, it picks some convoluted route with a lot of loops for no good reason. When I ask it to compute routes again, it straightens up and gives me the right route. Worst of all – when I noticed a mistake on the map, I submitted it. But instead of a streamlined process, I got contacted by another Wazer (probably a map editor) who asked me some more details about the business, and had never heard nor bothered to google for the business. I was told that Google Maps is not a valid source of information because Waze policy says no copyrighted information may be used to correct the map. (That seems like an OK policy.) Eventually, though, the map edit was accepted as is. Perhaps the user trusted me or perhaps they did their due diligence. However, a week later and the map edit has still not appeared on Waze. So much for that bureaucracy.

Waze has also been showing me ads for nearby businesses as soon as I stop at a traffic light or slow down. I don’t actually blame them for this. It could just be a tactic by Google to force people to just skip over to Google Maps.

All in all, I think my little Waze experiment is over. Time to go back to Google Maps, which keeps improving on a daily basis, by hook or by crook.

p.s. The last straw came just yesterday, when I sent my wife a message from the Waze app, to inform her of my ETA. The app asked me to pick out the contact and showed me her name and phone number. Normally, such a notification would be an SMS with a link. Uber does it like that, Lyft does it like that and frankly, that makes the most sense – the other person gets a link, opens it and can track you in their browser. But Waze noticed that my wife had the Waze app installed, so they decided to send her a notification inside the app. She doesn’t have notifications turned on for Waze. Why would she? No one needs random notifications from a low-usage app. So, she never even received the ETA link. This failure from Waze is a UX issue which they should resolve. They don’t need to re-invent the wheel. Just use the same SMS notification services that every other app in the world uses and get it over with. Since they chose to do it in this half-baked, non-thought-out manner, I think it’s high time I part with the service.

Photo by oniitamo