Courtney Martin’s essay on The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems really got to me. She makes the case that instead of traveling all over the world to solve social problems in other countries, we should focus on the problems at home:

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems is dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve avoided. While thousands of the country’s best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign dysfunction, we’ve got plenty of domestic need. […]

I think there is tremendous need and opportunity in the U.S. that goes unaddressed. There’s a social dimension to this: the “likes” one gets for being an international do-gooder might be greater than for, say, working on homelessness in Indianapolis. One seems glamorous, while the other reminds people of what they neglect while walking to work.

Her proposal is worth considering:

There’s a better way. For all of us. Resist the reductive seduction of other people’s problems and, instead, fall in love with the longer-term prospect of staying home and facing systemic complexity head on. Or go if you must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that “other people” become real people. But, be warned, they may not seem so easy to “save.”

I was lucky enough to see Sha Hwang‘s brilliant closing keynote at UX Burlington 2015 about his work on Healthcare.gov. So I was excited to see that Sha just posted a recent talk he did called Digital Materiality, a short reflection on gifs and gif culture:

gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are 
important: they do not belong to anyone. because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored.

Needless to say, there are some really good gifs in that talk…

Back in my eBay days, when Net Promoter was just becoming a huge deal, there came a time when we were asked to include the measurement in our user research. Even then I was extremely uncomfortable with the simplistic nature of the measure, but I just didn’t have the experience to speak up about it. It seems that NPS is finally getting the wind taken out of its sails. The latest takedown I read is Matt LeMay’s excellent On Net Promoter and Data Golems:

This very ubiquity is a huge part of what makes Net Promoter so attractive. It’s a system with an official-sounding name that consistently produces a measurable quantitative output. The score it produces can be easily benchmarked against that of any other company. And this is why, no matter how many times it is critiqued and debunked, Net Promoter only seems to grow in power and pervasiveness. The primary value of Net Promoter is not how effectively it predicts customer loyalty, but rather how effectively it covers your ass.

The main problem with the NPS question—”How likely are you to recommend [product] to a friend or colleague”—is that it’s a data model that doesn’t fit the social model of recommending products.

But by oversimplifying the multifaceted and highly variable human context around recommendation, Net Promoter falls into one of the biggest pitfalls of the “data-driven” age: it puts forth a data model that does not accurately reflect the underlying social model. When’s the last time you thought to yourself “I am likely to recommend this product to my friends or colleagues” as opposed to something like, “I can’t wait to tell my friend Tricia about this new slow cooker because I know that she doesn’t like to cook things on the stove”?

Luckily, Matt provides some really good ways to improve the use of NPS. Is this is something you deal with in your company I highly recommend his article.

Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with awkward humor, for money. Watch as the things we expect to be invisible, utilitarian, start oozing emojis and winky-smileys. Even Silicon Valley, global epicenter of whitewashed empathy voids and 1-percenter sci-fi wank fantasies, is going to pretend it cares about you.

Neil Cybart has a very interesting analysis of AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. From The Two Apples:

While AAPL investors look at changing revenue sources and Apple entering new industries as risk factors, for Apple such characteristics are normal business and according to plan. It is this divide that will likely continue indefinitely, suggesting it is unwise to expect AAPL to one day begin to follow Apple. Just as a declining AAPL stock price is no indication of a struggling Apple, there will likely come a time when AAPL outperforms peers even though Apple, the company, may be struggling.

The whole article is worth reading if you’re interested in the disconnect between a company that seems to be doing really well, and a stock price that doesn’t reflect that.

Tomorrow, a game called That Dragon, Cancer becomes available to play. The premise is heartbreaking:

An immersive narrative videogame that retells Joel Green’s 4-year fight against cancer through about two hours of poetic, imaginative gameplay that explores faith, hope and love.

Earlier this month Wired did an incredible profile on the creator of the game: Joel’s dad, Ryan Green. From Jason Tanz’s A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever:

Over time, That Dragon, Cancer became Green’s primary method of dealing with Joel’s illness, as well as a way for him to preserve a connection to his son, whom he struggled to get to know. In real life, Joel couldn’t talk about his feelings, leaving Green to guess at his thoughts and emotions. Joel’s reaction to radiation therapy was particularly puzzling. Children usually hated being placed on the gurney inside the giant linear accelerator, resisted the anesthetic, fought and clawed at their parents and doctors every time they entered the room. But Joel loved it. He grew impatient in the waiting room, and his face lit up when the doctors came to get him, more excited than his parents had ever seen him. Green couldn’t know just why Joel was so enthusiastic about undergoing the anesthesia, but he wrote a scene imagining the adventures Joel might be experiencing in his mind—riding animals made of stars, giggling and tearing across the cosmos.

It is an incredible story—equal parts sad and inspiring. This game scares me—I’m not sure I have the strength to play it. Here’s the trailer…