Categories
Dumb ideas

“I’m Feeling Unlucky”

A new dumb trend is threatening my patience: the all-inclusive search.

I’m probably just pissed because I’m old. Back in my day, search was used to find specific things. If you wanted variability, you included a wildcard, like “*” or “?”. People knew how to use these wildcards to focus searches on what they were looking for, and to filter out everything else.

Nowadays, the kids search with vague yearning. They hope to happen upon something that smells a little like a right answer. If something blows by that suggests relevance and tickles their informational appetite, their index finger is stimulated to twitch out a click.

Modern search is right there to serve that informational yearning and harvest those monetized clicky twitches.

Unfortunately, increasingly search is only there for that.

Any clear-minded soul searching for some specific needle in the infinite fuckshit stack is completely out of luck.

Here’s how it goes. If you enter some specific expression, because you want to search for precisely that verbatim thing, the search algorithm carefully picks the expression apart into isolated terms. Each term is blurred, fuzzed, inflated and broadened to include every possible form and tense of the word, every misspelling and homophone, every synonym, every vague association. The algorithm then searches for any individual instance of any of these maximally broadened terms and returns a galaxy-sized Boolean OR of chaos.

And of course, to keep things as simple as possible there is no way to override this default all-inclusivity. There is no way to narrow the search. Quotes do nothing.

Amazon’s past purchases search is one example of this trend. When I search for the two William James books I bought twenty years ago, I get 59 returns. Apparently, if a book includes the word “William” or the word “James” on any page, it is tossed onto the heap of returns. The two books I am looking for — the only two written by William James — are seven pages in. These are, in fact, the last two items in the return.

GoodNotes is another example. When I search, I am usually looking for a particular passage in a PDF. But my passages are disassembled into individual words, and each word is blurred to indistinction. Goodnotes tells me every single page where some wildly loose interpretation of any one of the words appears. Surprise! It could be anywhere! But at least I can feel secure that what I am looking for is somewhere in the results.

I’m sure that soon every product manager lemming will follow this shiny new best practice directly over the cliff.

They could save a lot of trouble just by providing an unfiltered all-inclusive list. They could even omit the text field and leave the search button. Click it and it searches for “*”. If the priority is avoiding any possible match, just including everything is a foolproof better-safe-than-sorry strategy. Best of all, it is quick and cheap to implement.

As far back as I can remember, Google search has had a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that works exactly this way. Everyone took it as routine Silicon Valley whimsy, but now it is clear: “I’m Feeling Lucky” was the future of search.

Categories
Apple atrocities

Reskeuomorphizing

Back in 2013, Apple threw the usability baby out with the skeuomorphic bathwater.

Now, apparently, Apple has decided to refill the tub with that same hokey bathwater, sans baby.

Categories
Apple atrocities

iOS speech transcription

Apple’s speech transcription defaults to proper names, and there is no way to change it.

Just now, I was being an old person and trying to dictate a text message. I tried to call something “ludicrous”. But Apple assumed I probably meant that the thing in question was Ludacris — which is, of course, utterly Ludacris.

Apple needs to stop working on its artificial intelligence until it gets its human intelligence in order.

Categories
Apple atrocities

Not that Pro

As everyone knows, when Apple gets serious about wringing serious cash out of its customers, it adds “Pro” to the product name.

I thought I knew why, but I did not. Now I do.

I grew up in the era of Apple as the tool of choice for professional content creators. Naturally, I assumed that any Apple product bearing the Pro moniker is called “pro” because it is a professional content creation tool.

Anyone outside the content creation industry who buys an Apple Gadget Pro is buying something designed and engineered for content creating elites, who require the very best tools to do their creative magic.

But this morning I was trying and failing to use my iPad Pro to edit some text. It is terrible at text editing. So I was having a loud crybaby fit about how if Apple wants its crappy gadgets to be useful tools for professional content creators, perhaps it should, after a decade and a half of negligence, improve the iPad’s text-editing. Maybe optimize it for writing long-form text like articles, stories or film scripts, not teeny-bopper nonsense.

But then, I had an epiphany. A calm settled over me.

Oh! . . . Not that kind of Pro.

Apple Pro products are not for professional content creators. They are not tools for content creation.

These products are fetish objects for Professionals, like business executives, lawyers, doctors, financial analysts. People with radically non-creative high-paying jobs, with massive disposable income.

Those people get the Apple Pro products.

Apple Pro products are luxury items. They are for owning.

I should have seen it sooner. Premium phones and watches are no more useful to a designer or writer or producer or coder than to anyone else. Vision Pro really drives home the point. If there has ever been a device for pure consumption by content consumers Vision Pro is it.

So these products feel unsuited for me precisely because they are not meant for people like me.

Somehow, understanding this fact is a bleak but real comfort.

Categories
Apple atrocities

Selecting message text

In the last year, the iOS app developer world has decided all at once to take away our ability to select bits of text in messaging apps, like Apple Messages, Facebook Messenger and Slack.

Apparently, they did this in order to optimize for putting little 👍 or 🤣 or 🥰 emojis on messages.

So, say we want to look up a word in a dictionary, or say we want select and copy just one part of a long message in order to quote it, or say we want to select a phone number out of an invite message — to name some real-life annoyances from just the last 24 hours… we now have to select and copy the whole message, paste that whole message into Apple Notes or some other text editing app, and then select and copy the text we want.

And this same emoji optimization limitation also applies to selecting multiple messages. So if you have a huge crybaby design tantrum on Messages and you want to copy the whole thing and dump it into a Design Grouch blog post, you have to copy and paste it line by line.

All this so lazy jackasses can more conveniently non-reply to messages with ❤️.

To that I say🖕.

Categories
Apple atrocities Dark musings

All ten-digit numbers are phone numbers

According to Apple ten-digit numbers are phone numbers.

For that reason, whenever I select a ten-digit number on my iPad, it helpfully insists that I do one of two things: 1) dial that ten-digit number on my iPad, or 2) cancel that call.

If I want to do something strange — for instance, copy that number in order to paste it somewhere — this iPad Pro is at a complete loss. Apparently, that is a use case nobody in that big glass doughnut anticipated.

More and more I am noting the hard-coding of anticipations into our lives.

When I select some text, my device tries to anticipate what I might want to do with that text and tries to anticipate what someone like me with probable intentions they would have would probably want to do next, and it makes it effortless to do it, but also forces me to work harder to do anything else.

When I’m writing AI tries to anticipate the next word someone saying a sentence like the one I am saying will say next, and it basically feeds me the most likely and least unexpected next word. It is already hard enough to think against the grain of one’s time, but now we are electronically prodded toward conventionality word-by-word in real time as we try to express the thoughts we are trying to have. Gently, but incessantly, we are bent toward rethought.

And recommendation engines have replaced serendipity with engineered epiphany. Where pure chance juxtapositions sparked originality in the minds of imaginative interpreters, now most juxtapositions are algorithmically-generated merchandising, designed to fabricate a spark of inspiration that will compel the desired purchase behavior.

And news stories, of course, are fed to us according to our ideological taste, which is the same taste as those like us. And by “those like us” I mean those who have been subjected to the same ideological molding process we have, who now not only believe the same facts we have, but have been intellectually pattered to reason along the same lines by the same sociological and psychological theories, and emotionally conditioned to feel the same responses to the same moral categories. And if something does not match the fact-set, reason-process and emotion-response patterns, “I can’t understand why.” “It does not make sense.” This auto-argument-by-incredulity is the error handling routine encoded into this populace.

The more we go along with what is suggested and accept the conveniences offered to us, the more our minds are intricately patterned for conformity. We automatically notice (and ignore) the things everyone else notices (snd ignores), think them through using the same logic, and come to the same conclusions everyone around us has reached.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that users should always have the option to copy a string of characters, even a ten-digit string of numbers that looks like a phone number.

Categories
Apple atrocities

Paste Without Formatting

Please pardon the uncharacteristically calm, respectful and positive tone of this post. The text below is a feature request I left on the Apple forum. I want to persuade them, and rumor has it that you catch more flies with honey than with boiling vitriol, my normal liquid of choice.

iOS Mail badly needs a “Paste Without Formatting” feature.

Currently, Mail lacks any convenient way to get pasted text into the default format. To get it to match, a user has to drill down into the formatting features and manually set them. I don’t even know what manual settings to choose to prevent the pasted text from looking weird.

A general point: I don’t know if I’m typical, but 99% of the time I wanted pasted text to match the formatting of any text I’m editing, whether email, word processing document, blog, or social media post. But with very few exceptions, I have to work against the UI to get this to happen. For whatever reason, the product management world seems to believe users want to paste with formatting most of the time. It seems to me that in most cases in most apps “Paste Without Formatting” would be the better default, and that “Paste With Formatting” should be the manually chosen option. Am I wrong?

I had all kinds of headaches when I accidentally pasted the text above with formatting, requiring me to undo the action on this massive iPad. And, of course, that means grasping the device with both hands and heaving it back and forth using the strength of my entire upper body, because the dipshits over at WordPress only provide “Shake to Undo” on their incredibly shitty and rapidly deteriorating iOS app.

Categories
Grudging non-hatred

Apple Pencil is OK, I guess

I hate to mar the pristine negativity of this blog, but Apple’s second generation Pencil is damn near perfect. I was just noticing how little I notice it, because it always works.

But is it as good as iCloud is bad? No.

Back to the regularly scheduled generalized hate.

Categories
Apple atrocities Dark musings Fuck you, Adobe TurdPress

Software on fire

I’m having a tough morning.

Last night I realized that a bunch of the contacts on my iPad that I thought had been added to iCloud were actually living in my Google contacts. I wanted all my contacts to live in one place.

So I dragged each of contact over into iCloud. After confirming each contact was, in fact, now living in iCloud, I deleting it from Google. Then I disabled the Google account. I had to do this because whenever you add a contact to Apple Contacts, the app gives no indication of where it is going. Nor does the contact view indicate where the contact is stored. Apple’s designers apparently believed this was irrelevant information, and decided to reduce cognitive load by not showing it. Back when “it just works” was a true marketing slogan, this kind of opacity was welcome simplicity. But now that things often do not work, it provokes anxiety. It is impossible to relax and trust that no news is good news. So even though I took pains to avoid mistakes, I was apprehensive.

And sure enough, this morning I discovered that the contacts I moved are all gone. They did not stay in iCloud, where they appeared to be last night.

I don’t know what happened.

I rarely know, anymore. I just know this is typical and that there is nothing I can do to make things better. It used to not be this way. These things used to work and now they don’t.

I have the same kind of problem with WordPress. I used to love using it. Now every single day, without fail, I’m trying to write something and something just idiotic happens, and trying to resolve the idiocy makes me forget what I was writing.

Today, for instance, I was trying to make one word in a block quote italic. I selected the word and tried to italicize it. When I hit the little italic I button, the entire text block selected itself and became italicized. Another problem is cursor placement. You place the cursor where you want to type. When you start typing, however, the letters appear on the line above. It is distracting and infuriating. And these are just a few of innumerable problems.

In all these cases, I just want to tell the company how frustrating it is that their entire design system is broken. The problem is not just isolated to that one usability issue, but rather, someone has treated the design system as a massive bundle of use cases instead of a design system.

The help desk is not trained for these kinds of complaints. They are trained to walk users through features they do not understand. They cannot take interaction design feedback. Least of are they equipped to take general UI design system feedback.

If 911 operators were trained like software help desk agents, here is how a “my house is on fire” call would go.

Agent: “This 911 emergency services. Thank you for your call. How can I help you today?”

Caller: “Help! My house is on fire!”

Agent: “Ok, I understand. Your house is on fire. Can you help me understand specifically what in your house is on fire?”

Caller: “The whole house is in flames! Help!”

Agent: “It sounds like many things in your house are on fire. Let’s walk through the specific items that are burning. When did you first notice flames in your home?”

Caller: “It isn’t just things inside my house that are on fire. I’m telling you, the entire house is burning to the ground. Can you send a fire engine, please?”

Agent: “I am happy to transfer you to someone who can talk to you about your house, which I understand is on fire. Please hold.”

Robotic Voice: “Thank you for waiting. Your call is very important to us. This is why we understaff our call center to save money. Estimated wait time: 37 minutes.”

 

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

Caller: “Hello…? …HELLO???”

 

So much established software that won market dominance through its superior user experience — has now become complacent in its dominance and allowed itself to decay into profound brokenness. No competitors have emerged to compete with them on user experience, because users — whole industries — are locked in.

I really miss being able to just use my software and being absorbed in my work. Now, invariably, I am interrupted and distracted by bugs, usability issues, unexpected UX “improvements” that require me to relearn stuff, and just trying to get the software to do what I am trying to get it to do.

And there seems to be nothing to do or say about it. These companies are just big, blank, subscription-sucking machines with nobody at home but ambitious young product managers. It would be better nobody were home.

Categories
Service malpractice

Amazon’s slimy dark patterns

An open letter to Amazon.com:

Currently, if a user is browsing books and clicks an author’s name, the user is moved into the Kindle store.

Does this make sense? What about clicking an author’s name suggests an interest in Kindle content?

I do not believe this has anything at all about the user’s preference. It has only to do with Amazon’s preference. It is a blatant dark pattern — a behavioral economics “nudge” to get an extra fraction of percent of Kindle purchases, at the cost of user experience.

It is slimy. I wish y’all would respect your customers and rely on good service and honest persuasion instead of behavioral manipulation to maximize your profits.

Thanks,

The Design Grouch