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.”

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.

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.

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.

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:

You’ll get old too, young designer. And when you can’t read your own product any more I’ll laugh so hard my teeth with fall out.

— Rian Van Der Merwe (@RianVDM) August 31, 2015

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.

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.

Craig Mod’s essay on doing design ethnography in Myanmar is so far my favorite piece of writing of the year. In The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar he shares some notes about the team’s visits and interviews:

There is a phrase repeated over and over again during my time in Myanmar: From no power to solar, from no banks to digital currencies, from no computers and no internet to capable smartphones with fast 3G connections. It is the mantra of consultants working in these emergent economies. And these emergent economies have one colossal advantage over the entrenched and techno-gluttonous west: There is little incumbency.

There is, however, instability—in government and currency. It’s one of the reasons why a country like Myanmar is just now getting these connections, these devices. The instability significantly increases risk for outside investors and companies. But the residual effect of that instability is a lack of incumbency and traditional infrastructure. And so there is no incumbent electric giant monopolizing rural areas to fight against solar, there is no incumbent bank which will lobby against bitcoin, there are no expectations about how a computer should work, how a digital book should feel. There is only hunger and curiosity. And so there is a wild and distinct freedom to the feeling of working in places like this. It is what intoxicates these consultants. You have seen and lived within a future, and believe—must believe—you can help bring some better version of it to light here. A place like Myanmar is a wireless mulligan. A chance to get things right in a way that we couldn’t or can’t now in our incumbent laden latticeworks back home.

It’s a long article, and it should be. There’s so much insight here, just from spending a few days with people observing, listening, understanding. I don’t understand why this truth is so hard for some product leaders to understand:

A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs.

Just imagine how different the world would be—and what incredible products we’d be able to build—if we always took the time to understand users and their needs in this way first.

Melissa Perri in Changing the Conversation about Product Management vs. UX:

Product Management with no User Experience Design creates functional products that don’t make users excited. User Experience Design with no Product Management produces delightful products that don’t become businesses.

I have a few quibbles with this article (including the idea that the role of UX is to make users excited…), but I like this quote because it ties in with a common theme I write about: the importance of combining both user needs with business goals to create successful products.