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With self-driving cars cities will need 90% less parking

In An End to Parking? Clive Thompson writes about an aspect of self-driving cars that I haven’t seen before: the impact it will have on urban design. In particular, the amount of space we need for parking should change dramatically:

Robot cars could also drive much more closely to one another, packing far more vehicles onto a street. […]

What’s more, they’d never need to park. At the University of Texas-Austin, Kara Kockelman—a professor of transportation engineering—modeled the impact of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles and found that each one could replace up to a dozen regular cars. The robocars could drive all day long, stopping only to refuel or for maintenance; at night, when there was less demand, they could drive out to a remote parking spot on the outskirts of town. The upshot, Kockelman figures, is that if you shifted the entire city to autonomous cars, it would need a staggering 90 percent less parking than it needs today.

Don’t shame users into reading your stuff

No thanks

Katie Notopoulos writes about an extremely annoying marketing trend in Guilt And Shame As A UI Design Element—opt-out messages that make you feel bad about opting out:

The worst shame offender of all, however, is quickly becoming the mailing list opt-out guilt trip. When visiting a website, a pop-up implores you to sign up for their fantastic mailing list. The only way to get rid of this list is to click on the fine print at the bottom. But too often, this doesn’t merely say “Opt out” or “No thanks.”

No. It forces you to click a statement acknowledging you are a terrible, deplorable, disgusting human being.

It is not just enough that you don’t want to subscribe to the mailing list about political news. You must admit that “no, I DON’T care about being well-informed and reading great journalism.”

Personal AI assistants: the battle and the war

A friend once told me that for him, one of the weirdest moments as a parent was the realization that their kids have a relationship with each other, not just with him. That conversation always stuck with me, and when our own daughters started to have a bond with each other that’s completely separate from their bond with us, I understood what he meant. It’s just something that is, for some reason, very difficult to wrap one’s head around—these people you made, suddenly having lives apart from you. Today I’m thinking of that conversation again, but in a very different context—personal AI assistants, and what that means for how we design their interfaces.

But before I get there, let me take a step back and recap some of the recent conversations about personal AI. In The internet bundle is already here Dieter Bohn writes that AI personal assistants are a threat to net neutrality:

The bundle is already here, it came from places we haven’t been watching closely enough, and it has many names. There’s more than enough doomsaying about the issues related to Instant Articles, Internet.org, and Binge On. Instead, I’d like to take a minute to doomsay what could become the other opponents to the kind of free, transparent, and open internet we all want: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Facebook M, and Google Now.

These intelligent assistants are great. I use them every day and expect I will continue to use them for, well, ever. But there’s a problem that’s built into them: they only seem to work with certain parts of the web and — here’s the real rub — certain apps.

Mark Wilson makes a similar argument in Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You, and then takes the argument further to imagine what happens when you have a bunch of non-neutral devices in your home:

But the problem with a scenario in which you can talk to anything is that you’re no longer talking to one thing. Only so many ears can live in one room. If I muse aloud that I need more shampoo in the shower, what hears me? Is it my iPhone sitting at the sink? Alexa networked in my apartment? Some new smart water nozzle from Kohler? […]

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid overzealous object in our lives, however confusing that may be, in a world where ordering milk becomes a bidding war on a commodities training floor?

Which future do you root for? They both sound horrible.

All of this is part of a big “the conversation is the interface” trend we’ve been seeing a lot of recently (see The search for the killer bot and 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce). From a design perspective the main challenge we seem to be thinking about is how to give these AI assistants the right personality (see The Next Phase Of UX: Designing Chatbot Personalities and The New Intimacy Economy). But I wonder if that’s the wrong AI design focus. I wonder if we should rather spend our time encouraging design for what Alan Cooper calls The Edges:

The difficulty in making these systems work smoothly comes from their edges, not from their centers. Each vendor builds a reliable and effective product, and through diligent testing assures that they meet high standards of performance. The only place where those standards fall is at the edges, where the maker is unsure of the requirements.

The edges are the interfaces with entities outside their control, outside their offices. Out there they are a little unsure of what they have to do and what forces affect them. Inside the company’s four walls they know exactly what they’re making, how it should behave, and what it should do. But for the entities outside those four walls, some measure of haziness creeps in, notably, the user.

Applied to AI assistants (and back to my parenting story), this means we need to start thinking about not just how humans interact with Siri and Alexa, but how Siri and Alexa interact with each other. There is, of course, a huge disconnect here between user needs and business goals. It would be very beneficial for users if different AI assistants could interact with each other, but that doesn’t help companies to strengthen their silos.

The trouble is that if we don’t figure out how to do this (and do it profitably), we might lose more than the battle of whose personal assistant wins. We might lose the war of personal AI getting any significant user adoption.

Encouraging creativity at all levels of society

Back in 1979 anthropologist Michael Thompson wrote a book called Rubbish Theory. Considered ahead of its time, the book—which has been out of print for decades—explores how discarded objects can become valuable and fashionable again, and how the line between what is regarded as rubbish and what is not regarded as rubbish can be moved. In the article Highlight the power of creativity from below Lorenz Khazaleh interviews Thompson about how the book (and underlying theory) is now finally finding an audience among anthropologists and city planners.

Here is Thompson on seeing so-called “waste pickers”—people who go through trash for valuable objects—as entrepreneurs who are creating wealth:

For example, during the workshop it was said that it does not make much sense to see waste pickers as complete victims. It makes more sense to see them as small-scale entrepreneurs who are creating wealth. They are not excluded, but they are not being recognized for what they are doing. Through skilled sorting and recycling, they are giving material that others regard as worthless new value. This change of perspective has gigantic implications, and not least for climate change.

Thompson goes on:

People generally are very creative and innovative. Many anthropological case studies have shown that. If development happens, it does not happen just through large-scale and “top-down” projects, but thanks to some sort of self help at the very lowest level. But often this creativity from below is not appreciated by the authorities or the wider society. Waste pickers who are sidelined or even prosecuted by authorities are just one of many examples. So, this is a wonderful opportunity for anthropologists to jump in and try to change public policies that prevent people from helping themselves.

This is yet another example of how beneficial anthropology (and its business cousin, ethnography) is in our understanding of people and their needs.

How to decide on prototyping fidelity

Ryan Singer shares some tips about prototyping tradeoffs in The Fidelity Curve: How to weigh the costs and benefits of creating UI mockups:

The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing.

I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing.

He goes on to provide some solid guidelines for when to go with paper & pencil vs. interactive or higher fidelity mock-ups.

Don’t clean your ears

Did you know that you’re absolutely, positively, not allowed to use Q-tips to clean your ears? Not only that, but you’re not even supposed to clean your ears at all. From Roberto A. Ferdman more-fascinating-than-it-should-be The strange life of Q-tips, the most bizarre thing people buy:

“People have been led to think that it’s normal to clean their ears — they think that ear wax is dirty, that it’s gross or unnecessary,” [Dennis Fitzgerald, an otolaryngologist in Washington, D.C.] said. “But that’s not true at all.”

Fitzgerald likens ear wax to tears, which help lubricate and protect our eyeballs. Wax, he says, does something similar for the ear canal, where the skin is thin and fragile and highly susceptible to infection.

“Your body produces it [ear wax] to protect the ear canal,” Fitzgerald said. “What you’re taking out is supposed to be in there. There’s a natural migration that carries the wax out when left alone.”

Even if our ears were meant to be cleaned, the truth is that Q-tips would still be a terrible thing to use, he says. The shape, size, and texture of cotton swabs is such that inserting them into your ears tends to push wax inward, toward your ear drum, rather than woo it out.

The article explains a true marvel of product design: perhaps the only “major consumer product whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.” It’s so interesting how it took the manufacturer decades to start warning against this behavior on the packaging.

Designing cities for citizens of all ages

Dominic Basulto wrote an excellent summary of a recent McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute report called What the world’s best cities will look like in 2030. The main point the report makes is that people in cities are aging, and we’re not really paying attention to that. There are, however, several things we can do to make sure that older people can live comfortably in our cities:

First, the city of the future should have the infrastructure and transportation links to address the needs of citizens of all generations. Second, each city should build new housing options to enable older citizens to “age in place.” Thirdly, each city should include access to community health programs with innovative medical technology for seniors. And finally, the city of the future should have plenty of opportunities for continuing work, education, arts and recreation for all ages.

This reminds me of an attempted joke I made the other day about the font size in Facebook Messenger1:

From cities to software, the evidence is all around us that if there’s one thing we desperately need to build more inclusive products, it’s a more diverse workforce. It’s very hard for us to design for people and situations that we have no experience with. We need to make sure our workplaces are more diverse, and then we need to go out and understand our users.


  1. I’m ridiculously embarrassed about that typo. 

How to deal with difficult stakeholders

Daniel Zacarias has some tips for How to Deal with “Sinatra” Stakeholders—those people (usually HiPPOs1) who only want to design and build things their way. At the end he makes an important point:

These stakeholder attitudes don’t come out of the blue or from malfeasance. They result from misalignment and even when you can’t change your entire organization, you can definitely affect change around your product.

This is something I constantly have to remind myself about. If someone isn’t buying into our vision or “getting” the design, it’s not their fault. It’s ours. It is our responsibility to bring people along on the journey. We can’t blame them if they come into a project context-less and then ask difficult questions.


  1. Highest Paid Person’s Opinion 

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