Virginia Heffernan’s A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute is a deeply cynical, extremely funny rant on our obsession with data:

These days, optimizers of squeeze pages, drawing lessons as much from the labcoats at Optimizely as from the big daddies at Google, recommend creating a three-to-10 minute video that’s introduced by a “magnetic headline” (“Find the Perfect Lampshade for Any Lamp”) and quickly chase it with an “information gap” like “You’re Not Going to Believe the Trick I Use While Lampshade Shopping.” (Article of faith among optimizers: humans find information gaps intolerable and will move heaven and earth to close them.) Next you get specific: “Click the play button to see me do my lampshade trick!” — after which the video unspools, only to stall at the midpoint with a virtual tollbooth. You can’t go on unless you hand over an email address. Presto.

A sucker is optimized every minute.

In How do Smartphones Affect Human Thought? Jenny Davis addresses the recent research behind the “Smartphones are Making Us Stupid” narrative:

[The research] hypothesis implies (though does not state) a research question: How does smartphone usage affect cognitive processes? This is an important question, but one the research was never prepared to answer thoughtfully. Rather, the authors recast this question as a prediction, embedded in a host of assumptions which privilege unmediated thought.

This approach is inherently flawed. It defines cognitive functioning (incorrectly) as a raw internal process, untouched by technology in its purest state. This approach pits the brain against the device, as though tools are foreign intruders upon the natural body. This is simply not the case. Humans [sic] defining characteristic is our need for tools. Our brains literally developed with and through technology. This continues to be true. Brains are highly plastic, and new technologies change how cognition works. Our thought processes are, and always have been, mediated.

The response echoes many of the points Clive Thompson brings up in Smarter Than You Think (my review) — namely that technology can be great augmentations to human thought. It’s not all bad.

I’ve been spending way more time with Google’s Material Design guidelines than I ever thought I would, but such is life.

Anyway, as I was going through it, and started to think about the Android side of an app I’m working on, I tweeted this:

Concerned about Material Design's reliance on label-less icons. Pretty sure most users don't know what these mean. pic.twitter.com/aH1IZvAyG6

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) March 11, 2015

That screenshot is from the section on Icons in the guidelines, but it’s not the only example. The whole document is full of screen shots of label-less icons. There’s not a single label in the section on Typography.

There’s lots of research about why this is a bad idea, but I’ll just cite two articles on the topic. First, Aurora Bedford sums it up nicely in Icon Usability:

A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity.

And Josh Porter also makes a good point in Labels always win:

I think labels should be kept around in almost all cases as they turn guesses into clear decisions. Nothing says “manage” like “manage”. In other words, in the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win.

Beyond that, there’s also plenty of evidence from A/B testing that even much-used icons like the hamburger menu is simply not well understood (see Hamburger vs Menu: The Final AB Test). So, be kind. Label your icons.

Update March 16, 2015

I’ve received some interesting and helpful responses from the Android community:

@RianVDM Agree, but they are labeled here which I have used countless times https://t.co/GYVxBoCOH9

— Mike Arney (@mike_arney) March 16, 2015

@RianVDM on Android a long press should show you the label of the icon, it's required when you develop an app for Android

— Omar Tosca (@otozk) March 16, 2015

My day didn’t start great. The first thing I read was Michael Dubakov’s statement about enterprise software people (i.e., people like me) in Enterprise software vendors have no taste:

My current theory is that enterprise software vendors have no taste. CEO, VP of development, Product managers that focus on enterprise market — all of them have no fucking taste. There is no taste in companies [sic] DNA, nobody cares about design and aesthetic. Profits, revenue, sales and new features — yes! Beautiful design — no.

Nobody, you guys. Literally nobody. I guess I don’t blame Michael for this false cause fallacy. It sure seems like a logical conclusion: product bad, therefore product person bad. As with most things, though, it’s more complicated than that.

Let’s start with the most difficult thing about designing in the enterprise space: in most cases, the people who buy the software and the people who use the software are completely different, and therefore have completely different needs. This is not a problem in the consumer market, where the person who gives you money is usually also the person who uses your product.

The people who buy enterprise software — IT managers, HR managers, etc. — care about things like configurability, control, more features than a competitor, and most of all: the ability to customize the thing just so, so that it fits in with whatever systems already exist. End users care about none of those things. They care about getting a job done as quickly and with as much enjoyment as possible.

So, what happens is what happens in most organizations that rely on outside sales. Many Sales teams go out and sell things that don’t exist in the product. And they often sign contracts that have two things in it that make designers wake up in a cold sweat: (1) a list of features (or — ugh, I hate this term so much — “product requirements”), and (2) delivery dates.

Product people then have to fulfill the needs of the contract/promise (as opposed to the needs of end users) in never enough time. Instead of having the time to understand a problem and user needs, building hypotheses and testing them, and taking time to iterate, they make a thing to hit a deadline and then move on to the next thing that has a deadline.

And that’s why enterprise software looks the way it looks. It’s not that product people don’t have taste. It’s that they don’t have agency.

But, I do want to say, there are welcome signs that this is changing. There is a new realization that the needs of buyers and end users can co-exist peacefully, and the result is better products. As an example, our new CEO is a huge advocate for design, and is pushing the organization to create “simple, smart, beautiful products.” This will take time, of course, but if you look at the new suite of apps that we’re working on, you’ll see that these are starting to look more like consumer products.

There are other things I think we can do to help along this shift:

• Train sales teams on the ins and outs of product development. How prioritization works, how long things generally take, what the major user needs are that the product is trying to solve, etc. If they have more knowledge about how their promises affect the teams, it will go a long way to change behavior.
• Spend as much time with end users as possible, record the sessions, and share it widely. Nothing gets an organization riled up about good design like seeing end users struggle with a product.
• Start on a small product that no one cares about (like the mobile site maybe?). Follow a Lean UX process (or whatever methodology you subscribe to). Build it well, and show people the results. Then start moving the process into other areas.

So, anyway. Yeah, enterprise software is still, for the most part, pretty bad. It’s time for us to break out of the constraints of the past that caused that, and do something better. It’s actually a good time to be in enterprise software. There’s so much opportunity, and a newfound agency for designers. I’m optimistic. The day can only get better from here.

I’ve been thinking about product feedback. We do alot of it at Jive, since most of our work happens in the open. It’s one of my favorite things about Jive and I wouldn’t change it for the world. We all want to make the best product possible, and you can only get that if you put everyone’s heads together.

So I’ve been thinking about how we can make sure we give each other good feedback. I went back and reviewed some of the things I’ve learned over the years about what makes product feedback useful. I wanted to share three articles in particular that have been really helpful to me. I’m going to try to use these techniques more, and I invite you to join in.

First, Mike Monteiro wrote a great post called How To Give Better Design Feedback (it’s now mysteriously gone from the internet, but I managed to resurrect a copy from my Pinboard archive and post it on Evernote). This part, in particular, is a great point to remember:

First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets. Better yet: ask your design team. You just wrote your first feedback question.

Cemre Güngör’s How to give better product feedback is also a great article to go through, and this is some good advice:

Describe objectively what you expected and what the product delivered (or fail to deliver). Speak about your particular experience “I got confused when I used this…” instead of generalizing “This is confusing…” or speaking of hypothetical user-beings “Users will get confused…”. This should help disarm the team and empathize.

The worst kind of generalizations speak on behalf of the whole wide world: “Nobody will like/use this”. Being dramatic is unlikely to make the product team start thinking about their work in a new context and change their ways.

But my favorite article on this, because it provides such a great framework for feedback, is Jared Spool’s Moving from Critical Review to Critique. The whole thing is fantastic, and it goes over how to structure a good review. Here’s the gist:

What makes a critique different from a critical design review is we are not there to find flaws. We’re there to learn from the design and to explore where it works well and where it could be improved.

In a well-run critique, we explicitly separate out the discussion of “What are we trying to do with this design?” from the discussion of “Does this rendition accomplish it?” By separating out these two pieces, we avoid digging into the designer’s work just because they unaware of a critical requirement or need.

This part is particularly effective:

The audience also now can explore the design. Often this is done, not with critical commentary, but with exploratory questions. “Have you thought about how users will share the photos with their friends?” “Have you considered how the application works when there’s no network connectivity?”

By posing their thoughts as questions, the designer can say whether they’d thought about that issue or not. If they have, it gives them a nice chance to talk about their thinking. If they haven’t, well, they just say, “No, hadn’t thought about that yet.”

If you have any other tips on giving good feedback, please let me know!

Lukas Mathis’ False Dichotomies is a great post about how quickly design feedback can turn into an argument about the wrong things:

In creative endeavors, tribal, black and white thinking can be problematic, because it prevents you from noticing all possible options. Whenever the discussion veers from «how can we solve this problem» to «should we pick option A or option B», you need to take a step back, and ask yourself — and your team — if these are really the only two options.

Is there any kind of middle ground?

Are there entirely different approaches we didn’t consider?

Are there valid concerns the other group is raising, and can we take these concerns into account without completely dismissing our own concerns?

Matthew Panzarino wrote something that historians will reference in thinkpieces on Medium 40 years from now. From The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved:

And that is the target market of the Apple Watch. Not “rich people” (though there’s a model specially for them), not “tech geeks” and not “Apple fanatics.” It’s people who want more time, and that is a very large target.

This, for some reason, is the thing that Apple has had a hard time articulating. This is the primary use case of the Watch. It’s not just that it’s a “notification center”; it’s that it allows you to act without any additional distraction.

The idea that some new technology will give us more time to do “other stuff” is as old as technological innovation itself. By now we should have learned that no, actually, this time isn’t different. But we’ll never learn. We approach every new technology with starry eyes and hopes and dreams of a life less time-consuming. When I read something like this, I always think about this classic scene from Arrested Development:

In just one of several historical examples of the time-saving delusion, John Maynard Keynes published an essay in 1930 called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren [PDF], in which he predicted that technological innovation will save people so much time that they won’t know what to do with themselves:

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

That, alas, has not happened. We are busier than ever these days. Instead of giving us more time, our technologies have instead given us more ways to be connected, to stay in touch with work, to never have to leave the office. I don’t see how one can argue that the Apple Watch will reverse this trend.

What the Apple Watch will do instead, I believe, is to accelerate a different trend, described by Douglas Rushkoff in Present Shock:

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

I’m not saying the Apple Watch won’t be wildly successful, or that I don’t want one — I definitely want one. I just don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking it will somehow give us more time because we might look at our phones less. If history teaches us anything, it’s that we’ll find a way for the watch to fill up our “saved” time in other ways — and then some. And in doing so we’ll continue on the path Kevin Kelly lays out in his excellent book What Technology Wants:

Our lives today are strung with a profound and constant tension between the virtues of more technology and the personal necessity of less: Should I get my kid this gadget? Do I have time to master this labor-saving device? And more deeply: What is this technology taking over my life, anyway? What is this global force that elicits both our love and repulsion? How should we approach it? Can we resist it, or is each and every new technology inevitable? Does the relentless avalanche of new things deserve my support or my skepticism—and will my choice even matter?

That said, this post is only about the first version of the Apple Watch. The next watch is a different story. The next watch might be the one that finally saves us time. Just wait. You’ll see.

Robinson Meyer reflects on Medium and What Blogging Has Become:

And I too, a lowly twentysomething, pine for days of less centralization. As I wrote a few days ago, in a New Medium-style short post, “I still find the idea of a diverse blogosphere — arrayed across tens of thousands of URLs, with sites organized by author and shaped by distinctive interests — really, distinctively, unavoidably cool.”

But is there a place in the web ecosystem for this kind of writing anymore? And is the cost of using Medium, which will centralize writing and create a kind of publisher/publishee power inequality, worth the ease? What will happen when widespread abuse comes to Medium, the way it’s come to Twitter? And social media companies have proven tremendously malleable, product-wise, to the desires of other companies — will Medium be the same? What does a piece of advertising look like on Medium anyway, when the line between journalism and PR on it is already so thin?

I’ve been around long enough for Blogger to rise (and fall), for MySpace to be the best (and then the worst) place to write your thoughts, and for Posterous and Windows Live Spaces to disappear (along with all my posts there). So I will stubbornly hold on to writing on this here, my very own URL.