The best design is invisible.

In most music apps, I inevitably leave shuffle mode on for longer than I'd like. I might enable it when listening to a playlist. When I later listen to an album, I might get halfway through before realizing shuffle is still enabled and the songs are playing out of order.

This never seems to happen on Spotify, however. Spotify seems to automatically disable shuffle whenever it's no longer wanted. I don't know what heuristic Spotify uses to determine when shuffle should be disabled, and as a user, I don't really need to care. All I know is that shuffle never seems to be on when it shouldn't be.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

It is my opinion that Windows, macOS, and other desktop operating systems should not allow users to save items to the desktop. Saving to the desktop is the equivalent of carelessly throwing papers on a desk. It also inhibits learning. Why use bookmarks, folders, or search when everything can just be thrown on the desktop?

Whatever convenience or advantages the ability offers, it's not worth the confusion and frustration it inevitably creates. As just one example, I know someone who has a half-broken monitor and who could replace it, except that a new monitor with a different resolution would cause the desktop icons to move, a price he's not willing to pay.

The flip side of this complaint is a tech tip: If you want to get better with digital file organization, make a commitment to stop saving files to the desktop.

#Technology #TechTips #Usability #UserExperience

I dislike when online platforms are split into multiple sub-sites (sometimes called servers, instances, organizations, or groups), such that each user has one profile on each sub-site and each profile has its own settings. Slack works this way, as do Meetup and Stack Exchange. For example, if I change my personal Slack settings in one organization, my settings for other organizations do not change.

Why do these platforms work this way? I see no upside for the user. Even if there is some esoteric benefit, I suspect most users find it incredibly confusing. I certainly do. Sure, there may be cases where I want settings to be different for different sub-sites, but that should be the exception rather than the rule

#Technology #Usability #UserExperience

I started using Signal years and years ago, back when it was called TextSecure. I've always appreciated its commitment to privacy, including its use of end-to-end encryption, and its focus on usability. Precursors like Enigmail were great, but few people used them. Glenn Greenwald famously couldn't be bothered to set up a secure communication channel when Edward Snowden implored him to do so. When he finally got around to it, Snowden sent him the documents that changed his career forever.

Now, I'm finally replacing some Google services with equivalents from Proton, another company that aims to make privacy easy. I'm impressed with their growing product line, and I don't want to fuel the attention economy any more than I have to. Consider checking them out! A healthier internet awaits.

#Business #Communication #Technology #Usability #UserExperience #Wellbeing

I once wrote a blog post entitled Less is more. It did fairly well on Hacker News, and two people commented in situ. I was pretty excited. (The comments weren't able to be migrated here.)

Years later, I read the following article from the Washington Post, which dovetails nicely with it. I recommend giving it a read:

We instinctively add on new features and fixes. Why don’t we subtract instead?

#Business #PersonalDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

Every so often, I'm reminded that the web is almost unusable without an ad blocker. I'm amazed anyone can tolerate it for more than 10 seconds.

Use an ad blocker.

I recommend AdGuard because it's thoughtfully designed. It has the user interface I've always wanted from an ad blocker, where the user can select broad categories of ads and annoyances to block or pick and choose from more specific filters, which are hidden by default. uBlock Origin is more popular with technologists, but I find its settings UI to be overwhelming.

I genuinely believe in supporting publishers, but not through modern advertising. If a website you like offers an ad-free experience for some price, consider paying for it. Otherwise, I think you're more than justified in using an ad blocker to protect yourself from the sludge being thrown at you. Doing so is arguably an ethical obligation. Online advertising has completely run amok, harming our privacy, our digital security, and our sanity. The attention economy it fuels has tremendously harmful downstream consequences—addiction, misinformation, political extremism—that threaten society at large.

Use an ad blocker.

#Business #SocialMedia #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

Cross-platform messaging is a mess. That is, sending a message from an iPhone to an Android phone, or vice versa, still doesn't work right. Want to create a group chat or respond to messages on your computer? Good luck.

One solution would be for everyone to buy Apple products. That's not realistic, and it only rewards bad behavior; Apple's “our way or the highway” attitude is the reason this is so bad in the first place.

Another solution? Use Signal. Seriously. Just use Signal. Get everyone you know on Signal and never look back. It's time to text like it's 2023.

#Business #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

I've been using Android for more than ten years now. I originally chose it in an ethical commitment to open-source software, but it's become less open over time.

Some people might be surprised to learn that I think Apple makes better products. Apple understands usability and user experience better than almost any software company, they pay exceptional attention to detail, and they've done genuinely important work on privacy. Still, they're not perfect. I think Apple too often prioritizes form over function, with the overuse of gestures being a good example, they lock users into their ecosystem, they position their products as status symbols, and they don't play nicely with others. In my opinion, they also market privacy more effectively than they actually protect it.

As an aside, I'm disappointed that Apple has become “the privacy company” when Mozilla should have claimed that title long before them. In hindsight, Mozilla may have been mistaken not to strike while the iron was hot in June 2013. Of course, it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback; it's harder to be in charge. At least Mozilla is doing great work on privacy today.

In any case, I'm considering making my next phone an iPhone, but switching now would be a hassle. Vendor lock-in is real and Google is almost as guilty as Apple. Interoperability matters.

#Business #SoftwareDevelopment #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

It's 2023. We have incredible technology like DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT, but iPhoto and Google Photos still can't collaborate on a shared photo album. Texting is even worse. Then there's collaborative playlists, collaborative note-taking, videoconferencing, the transmission of large files, and so much more. Any of these things can be achieved if all participants are using the same software, but different applications with similar capabilities refuse to work with one other. If I use Spotify and you use Apple Music… too bad.

This is understandable, but so unnecessary. I can't even imagine how much time and energy we lose to this segmentation. Interoperability matters.

#Business #Technology #Usability #UserExperience

The Helix text editor fascinates me.

Vim has been my primary text editor for more than ten years now. (Technically, I've been using Neovim for two or three years, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll use the term Vim generically in this post. The two editors aren't that different, in the grand scheme of things, and their differences aren't relevant here.)

I think of Vim as an IDE that one builds themselves. That can be good and bad. I have a deep understanding of my editor's capabilities, for example, because I enabled many of its features myself. It's also completely free and it supports just about every popular programming language out there. However, configuring it takes time and handling conflicts between plugins can be annoying. I also find that it's difficult to keep abreast of the state of the art in text editing this way. It took me a while to discover that other people were using multiple cursors, for example, because that feature wasn't added to my editor automatically. I'm sure there are lots of other useful features I could add to Vim, if only I knew they were common in other editors. I don't know what I don't know.

Ultimately, if I were just starting out today, I'm not sure that I'd make the same investment in Vim. When command-line editing is truly required (my original motivation), Micro is a great choice, being much easier to use and more than powerful enough for most tasks. For everything else, JetBrains IDEs are pretty magical, if occasionally overwhelming.

Helix seems to sit somewhere in the middle. It's console-based, with modal editing and Vim-like keybindings, but with Everything Everyone Wants built-in: LSP, tree-sitter, fuzzy-finding, etc.

I'm not sure which editor I'll be using in ten years. Maybe I'll still be using Vim because it's comfortable, or JetBrains because it's straightforward. I'll add Helix to the list of contenders, though.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Technology #Usability #UserExperience