Category: Dumb ideas

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.

It seems that most of my usability frustrations these days involve trying to prevent software from helping me in unhelpful ways.

Software wants to finish my sentences for me, correct my word choices, anticipate my formatting decisions, offer me a handy tip on how to do what I am doing.

The experience is like being followed around by a clueless, eager college graduate who just wants to be helpful, but has no idea how, but who somewhere picked up the idea that demonstrating an intent to be helpful is better than doing nothing.

Doing nothing is far better than constantly forcing me to undo unhelpful helpfulness.

This year I am adopting a new rule: Every time I find myself yelling at an inanimate object I will stop yelling, and write a Design Grouch rant instead.

Apologies in advance for the avalanche of content this unwise resolution will unleash.

This year I pledge to maintain a strict 2:1 ratio of people who like me to people who cannot stand me.

Any less than that, I’m probably misbehaving. Any more than that I’m probably being a wuss.

I’ll leave it to you to guess the current ratio.

A great many people, many of whom are not professional designers, have begun telling people that they are designers.

Consequently, a great many people who have never systematically practiced design have come to expect acknowledgment of the fact that they designers, and they especially come to expect this from professional designers.

A professional designer who won’t embrace everyone else as fellow designers is a snob or a jerk.

Well, I happen to be one of these snobbish jerks.

I have good reasons for this, in addition to actually being a snob and a jerk.

For one thing, part of my job is attempting to get other people to do design, and I’m here to tell you: a lot of people suck at it and can’t do it.

For another, I have to use things that non-designers have designed or product managed, and that has led to the miserable existence of this garbage blog.

Now, of course, the idea that everyone is a designer is not entirely wrong. After all, we do all design, sometimes multiple times a day.

But does this mean that everyone is a designer? Isn’t a designer someone who has put enough effort into developing design skills that they’re good at it? I mean, think about it. Everyone prepares food. Do we go around claiming that everyone is a chef? Don’t we reserve that term for someone who has deliberately cultivated their cooking skills?

It is strange to me that out of all the professions, it is design that is required to flatter everyone else that they’re also designers.

Now I’m all for the idea that everyone can and often should participate in design.  I’ll also say that most people could benefit if they improved their design skills. Some people have talent and can potentially improve their design skills a lot and become really great designers. And a great many people just don’t have the ability and temperament and won’t ever get that good at design. So what? Nobody’s good at everything.

So, everyone designs. Not everyone designs well. Not everyone cares if they design well or not. Some think they design well, because they aren’t even clear on what a designer is supposed to do, and don’t bother going about it the right way.

Those who do care if they design well, and work at figuring out the best methods for doing it well, and then practice these methods in order to get better and better at them — those are the people we should call designers.

Moral: Until we say that everyone who cooks is a chef, everyone who obeys the law is a lawyer, everyone who speculates on other people’s minds are psychologists, everyone who puts a bandaid on a cut is a doctor, everyone who has a theological opinion is a priest, everyone who believes in gravity is a physicist — let’s please fucking stop saying everyone is a designer.