I'm surprised Googles ad business stays afloat. It seems every video I watch on YouTube is preceded with a Grammarly advert, a service I have no use for and will not subscribe to/pay for in the future.
I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want.
As someone who worked in advertising...advertising isn't really about connecting you with things that you want. It's about putting something in your head to make you want it.
Any geography buffs able to explain why the greenspace in Northern Africa seems to ebb and flow across this time period? That looks quite interesting but I can't seem to find anything about it.
This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.
I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
I really think society is sleepwalking into a ton of problems with mass media consumption (mostly by the phone, and of which Instagram is one component). We are not supposed to be filling every gap in our lives with videos, games, music, and short-form content.
It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.
It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.
Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.
Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?
Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?
Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.
Throughout most of human history, most people were slaves and workers. They weren't there to think, they were there to push stone from place A to place B. The society at large isn't going to collapse if we return to the state where most of humanity does mindless jobs and have mindless lives, while the ruling class of people with self-control pull the strings.
I guess societal collapse was a bit melodramatic of me. I guess I just wanted to vent a bit. It's just sad that we live with such a hijacking force in our pockets and that seems to be having an adverse effect on the way people handle their jobs and lives.
I honestly believe that intelligence and self-awareness of average person is very limited. This is frustrating to observe from the point of view of someone who was promised golden age of human creativity and whatnot. But it is what it is. My take is, if you want the humanity to move forward, have kids and teach them to read scientific books instead of scrolling TikTok. Alternatively, exploit the human stupidity to put yourself in a comfortable social position, and then stop giving a fuck.
> I too want to get paid 500k to sit on a bean bag, drink lattes, have office affairs, work a 3 hours day
Unfortunately this was most of the lot that Google and others cut loose in the last layoffs.
There was a few TikTok montages of "my day working at Google/LinkedIn Microsoft" (eat breakfast, snack time, eat lunch, eat dinner, check emails, massage, go home) which now have a additional "day in the life of being laid off from Google" follow-up.
Is this just one of the top dogs at Stripe bigging up their own company?
Surely it's common public opinion that most social initiatives and stances major companies take are entirely about publicity and reflect whatever they think the bulk of their consumer base supports.
If tomorrow 60% or so of McDonalds (or any other company) customer-base became national socialists, McDonalds would have a red, black and white swastika-laden logo within month-end.
It's all pandering. Always has been, always will be. There's even terms for each type: pink-washing, rainbow-washing etc.
The only alternative is to take a neutral position, where you just focus on whatever product/service you are selling.
> reflect whatever they think the bulk of their consumer base supports.
I've been trying to put my finger on what seems so strange to me and I think this is it in part.
Someplace like the US is pretty heterogeneous, and their customers' attitudes aren't going to change overnight.
I'm not naive about why some companies do what they do. What's strange to me is the speed with which some of these changes were made, and neglecting their particular customer base, which they might have built up for a long time.
In some of these cases, fear of legal persecution, maybe based on inside information, makes much more sense to me than following trends. I guess you could argue they are the same thing, to which I'd say I think that's true at one level but not at another functional level.
>What's strange to me is the speed with which some of these changes were made
That's because while the original commenter is correct in terms of companies doing what they believe their consumer base supports, they ignore half of the equation, which is that it was never JUST about the consumers. It was also about protecting the company from disparate impact lawsuits, where any difference in the makeup of a company compared to the general public could be interpreted as discrimination, regardless of whether it actually does discriminatory practices.
My guess is that these companies feel that with the new US administration the risk of these kind of lawsuits has decreased significantly.
Material Design v1 cracked it. It was simple to implement, simple to understand and simple to use. Minimal overheads with a clear content-first approach.
"It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level."
I don't want websites and apps to connect with me on an emotional level. I want to turn my phone/computer on, use the app/program to achieve what I'm trying to do, and turn it off again, so I can get back to the real world.
> I don't want websites and apps to connect with me on an emotional level. I want to turn my phone/computer on, use the app/program to achieve what I'm trying to do, and turn it off again
Building a B2B SaaS app one of the most refreshing thoughts I've had about it was: "people don't like using my app". The software I'm building nobody wants to use, but they have to use it for their work.
Given that I try my hardest to make the app as efficient and as fast as possible so that people can go in, do their thing, and get out. With things like design's I'm very careful to preserve the button layouts of all the UI's because I know my customers have largely memorized where they are.
I could see adding some "flare" like this in lower touch points in my app but I would not do this for high touch points. Those places need to be fast and predictable, a customer won't look too kindly on any redesign if they now have to spend an extra second or two looking for an action or waiting on an animation.
In terms of MaterialUI though, my app actually uses M2 (via the React MUI lib) and I'm pretty happy with it. I wish like hell Google would finish their M3 web implementation so I could hop on that instead of using a 3rd party lib but it seems Google has gotten M3 to where they personally want it and just kinda abandoned development.
My best experience with job-related software was a data entry program (I forgot the name). It had a windows classic UI (on windows 8) and fully keyboard driven. After a few days, I could just look at the paper form and enter the data without looking at the screen. Very usable on a 11inch screen.
These days, I mostly reverted to a Emacs/TUI workflow. Padding and animations makes everything less usable.
I work with Shopify apps, and we’re currently struggling with this because they enforce their design system to grant you a “Built for Shopify” badge that boosts trusts and listing rankings.
The problem is that to follow their design system, you have to turn a self explaining button into a full page with useless text, because they think your homepage should have an onboarding description to make users “excited to use your app”.
This is so company centric, no one will ever be excited to use your app, they just want to solve their problem and leave as fast as possible.
I think it was the worst one. At least from an interoperability perspective: sure, a giant floating "+" in a circle in notes app on a mobile device is alright CTA to add a new note, but on anything bigger than that (even an iPad screen) it's bad.
Apps and websites using it felt like "Work in Progress, we will style it later" except there was no later it was already styled and was just ugly.
> sure, a giant floating "+" in a circle in notes app on a mobile device is alright CTA to add a new note
No, it’s not, because it floats over the actual content, which means that the user can neither see nor interact with the content under it. Of course, no one carefully designs the rest of the UI to make sure that content doesn’t get stuck under the floating button.
It’s remarkably common for some floating UI element to obscure the bottom portion of something scrollable. You can’t work around this by scrolling because, if the region in question is on the screen at all, it’s at the bottom.
Even Mobile Safari messes this up on occasion — sometimes the URL bar at the bottom obscures the bottom of a page, and, while one can temporarily reveal it by dragging up, the content rubber-bands right back down when the user lets go.
A small amount of searching suggests that dvh and svh have semantics on Mobile Safari that are, at best, confusing.
But I think this misses the point. Mobile Safari has a heuristically auto-hiding “toolbar”, and the heuristic is far from perfect, and the toolbar overlays the content, and Safari tries to offer some features that maybe let webpages move their content out of the way when hidden. And the result works poorly sometimes.
Fundamentally, doing a good job of having a control sitting on the section of the screen that shows content and mitigating the risk that the control obscures the content is hard.
As much as I generally like MDv1: I hate those floating buttons with a passion.
They can occasionally work. But the vast majority of the time they simply get in the way and can't be hidden, because you're in a content-edge-case that doesn't scroll far enough, or you simply reached the end and they didn't leave after-end padding to make room for it. And very few actions are so important that you want to display it over everything else, for the same reasons that everyone recommends against popups.
Just put it in the freaking toolbar. Top or bottom, I don't care.
I'm so used to some random bs floating on the screen bottom-right (useless chat assistant or something), so my brain is trained to ignore those elements.
I had the same reaction when they said that "younger study participants had the most enthusiastic preference for M3 Expressive." Could it be that young people are most likely to be impressed by pretty bullshit, and the whole point of this redesign is futile?
They have to pretend you want emotional designs. Because how would they keep their jobs? Every iteration of material design needs some bullshit improvement.
I don't entirely agree. This mentality is what leads to brutalist architecture offices that suck out the soul of all who work in them. People "live" and "work" in their apps and should feel alive while they do that. (That said, I don't think this new material style is necessarily the way to achieve that...)
Material design v1 is the reason we have extremely low information density and extreme whitespace everywhere.
Just compare the original Gmail UI to the one Google has now. Or original Adwords admin page to the one they launched 2-3 years ago.
Its a regression in every possible way.
And apple is also not far behind in enshittyfying their UIs in order to merge the Desktop and the Smartphone paradigms into one.
This is the worst phase in UX/UI history we have ever witnessed.
It's effectively designing to maximize attention retention, or however you want to call it. Keep the eyes at your product for as many seconds as possible, to increase profit.
I must be going through some mental changes nowadays. I just want my computers and software to get their job done and go back to the real world as soon as possible. I feel sad about all the time I lost staring at screens growing up. I wonder if this will be widespread opinion someday.
The quicker the phone is back in the pocket, or the computer is turned off again after using it for something (that it does better than I can) the better.
I'm going through the same thing. Grew up dreaming of having a pocket computer. Nowadays you can basically live your entire life on the internet, as others are doing the same; people (think they) get their social needs met, buy food, do their work, find partners, anything. And it seems like a big part of the younger crowd wants (?) this trend to continue.
I don't want to speak for you, but I think there's a big crowd that's unique here: we have one foot in the "old world" and got to experience that, and now we see the "new world".
If you grow up with basically a phone in your hand, and you see how big a part of your life it is, I think you're way more inclined to appreciate these changes. After all, their phone is an extension of who they are, it's part of the whole picture, the outfit.
Thanks for writing this. It's refreshing to see there's a bunch of us in the same boat.
I think you've hit the nail on the head about the two worlds. My phone sits in my pocket most of the day and just comes out when I need it. Every day I see people looking at their phone as they walk through busy streets, walk their dog, pushing prams, at the gym on the treadmills, bikes and on the machines. Especially jarring to see when it's a rarish sunny day and all that changes is the brightness setting on their phone.
Yeah, my phone is just an accessory I keep in my pocket, but only when I know I may need it for something, e.g. time or calls. Sometimes I do not even take it with myself. No reason for me to do that. I just hit 30.
> I feel you guys, but do you read and write here from your laptops? I never come here from a desktop browser, only a smartphone.
I do. I hate virtual keyboards and the typing experience on a phone frustrates me to no end, and the copy & paste experience is just as poor. During the workday I don't even look at or use my phone, I reply to messages from my Mac when needed.
Anything that needs more than a couple lines back and forth I do from my laptop. Having a full discussion or conversation using a phone virtual keyboard is such a user hostile experience to me.
> Having a full discussion or conversation using a phone virtual keyboard is such a user hostile experience to me.
Same - when I'm scrolling Reddit I often feel like I want to add a comment, but then think about having to "type" a few paragraphs on my phone, and just pass on it. However, I'm definitely on the older side, and I do understand that the younger generations have no such qualms.
Yup, pretty much my experience. There is no way I am going to write paragraphs on a phone. I do not know, I just hit 30, so I guess I am considered old? I definitely am old school, though! You know, nothing fancy, just Void Linux with i3, XTerm, etc.
You know what I wish I could get? A Blackberry phone with that keyboard (maybe KeyOne?). I wonder if there is anything like that still in production.
> You know what I wish I could get? A Blackberry phone with that keyboard (maybe KeyOne?). I wonder if there is anything like that still in production.
Yes! Before the iPhone came out my daily driver was a BlackBerry Bold. The keyboard was perfect, and it had the trackball (and later, trackpad) for text selection. Still not full size keyboard typing speed but pretty close. Then I switched to the first gen Moto Droid when it came out and it had the slide open landscape keyboard. Not as ergonomic as the black berry but it worked. Then after the first iPhone, everyone dumped physical keyboards and I'm still salty about it.
I wish there was room in the mobile space to break apart the Samsung/Apple duopoly. Would have loved to see both Windows phone and webOS succeed, and the variety of devices that could have brought.
I thought the same way, some years ago. I even eyed that one Nokia smartphone with keyboard, you can install Linux onto. (For nvim!)
But over time, I just learned how to use swipe keyboard, and so my iPhone writing is pretty fast. If I’m feeling I want a long thing to type, I’m reaching for my laptop, if I can. But otherwise, I can type a very long thing from my iPhone too.
How do you manage your life without a laptop? Do you never travel? It’s so hard for me to go somewhere without taking my laptop. I’m even seeking the lightest possible laptop with Linux, so I’d have it most times. Eyeing MacBook Air 11” or M1 or a Pixelbook. Still not sure which one. I’ve seen ThinkPad Nano too.
I do not travel, but if I were to travel, I would definitely get a laptop. I would probably go with ThinkPad or some affordable gaming laptop (because I would want a GPU in it).
I read and write from a desktop PC at work. Echo the other person who replied. I can't stand virtual keyboards for writing anything as long as ... about this comment.
And yet they had to have a study with 600 people to tell them that ... text fields have to look like txt fields. And they still failed to make textfields look like textfields
It shows that this document is not meant for end users. People who want to sell their apps or indirectly by having people watch the included ads want users to connect on an emotional level.
Publishers don't want you to go back to the "real world", they want your money (or attention). Sometimes, the goals align, like for business software, where they measure productivity, but sometimes not, like with ad supported apps.
Video games are another case. Here emotions are the entire point. But games rarely use standard UIs anyways.
They managed to connect me to an emotional level that I just want to throw my phone away and get a phone that supports postmarketOS. I despise the new designs so much, they are so useless and try to take away important information on the screen for absolutely no reason. While making everything round and trying so hard to copy iOS, but making a shitty job at it.
But … that way phones would get obsolete much faster, and so you’d be able to buy an obsolete sluggish Pixel of two years old, and install something different on it! Like Lineage, Graphene, Postmarket.
Why keep pursuing it if you don't like it in general?
I don't like coffee. I've tried most of the variations over the years, and don't like any of them. So I don't drink it.
The top comment and tons of others are people trying to work around what for many is simply a general dislike of coffee. Good beans, clean water, certain temperature. That's not going to change somebody who doesn't like the taste of coffee.
I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want.
Feels like a bubble to me..