Technology enables UX. When the underlying technology is commodity—which is often the case—it's easy for competitors to copy the UX. But sometimes UX arises from the tight marriage of design and proprietary technology.
Good UX also arises from good organization design and culture, which aren't easy to copy. Think about a good customer support experience where the first agent you talk with is empowered to solve your issue on the spot, or there's perfect handoff between agents where each one has full context of your customer issue so you don't have to repeat yourself.
Furthermore, this photo-forward interface design pattern presents candidates' physical attractiveness as the most salient feature. While this is desirable in a dating app, this is probably not very relevant for assessing people for their potential as musical collaborators.
From the top of my head, I'm going to guess people want (1) personable and agreeable bandmates with (2) compatible music styles, (3) musical talent and skill, and (4) can play instruments or roles that a band is missing.
So the interface should support users in presenting and finding these traits. If I were to design it, I'd have:
- Auto-playing music sample gallery. This is the most important thing to present. The current design asks the user to dig into Youtube and Soundcloud links — which is very high-friction and would have the user jumping between this app and other apps every few seconds.
- One-minute self-introduction video. This helps the user grok the general 'vibe' of someone.
- Allow users to connect their Spotify or other music accounts. Then show users their shared music interests. This can provide another clue about having compatible musical personalities.
At the end of the day, the advice seeker is responsible for the evaluation of given advice for their situation.
That's a key difference between advice and instruction.
The advice giver cannot know the seeker's situation completely, nor can the advice seeker know the giver's.
An AI cannot be trusted to give The Answer. But you can use AI to explore other perspectives and critique your thoughts—not that its critiques will be correct either. Nonetheless it can help get you on different thinking paths that your normal thought patterns wouldn't guide you on.
I'm impressed by how much sheer ~style~ PostHog is rocking, from the Ursula von Der Leyen privacy notice to hedgehog Godzilla hero video on their home page.
I find this comment dismissive, negative, and disrespectful; I feel compelled to write an opposite comment should the author himself read this.
It requires sensitivity to notice and appreciate the little details in our world. The author has shown a wealth thereof. He took exceptional time and effort to uncover and document all kinds of wonderful interactive details for us to appreciate. He wrote in a clear, direct manner, and he had his writing reviewed by others.
His article shows a rare level of passion, attention to detail, and respect for the reader. You don't have to agree with it, but you should at least respect it.
To Rauno Freiberg should you read this: thank you for writing and sharing this article.
Humans have moral agency whereas animals have little or none. Animals must listen to their instincts, whereas humans get a choice.
That choice is more important to some people, less important to others.
This depends on which animals people consider to be moral subjects and therefore worthy of moral consideration, rights, and protections.
Some people (vegans) consider all animals as moral subjects. Some people (pescatarians) may consider most animals as moral subjects, but not certain ones like fish.
Most people consider some animals like dogs, cats, and horses, as moral subjects, and not others like cows, chickens, and pigs.
These definitions are unconsciously arrived at by sociocultural factors, but some people consciously arrive at them.
I have a VanMoof bike with both a GPS and a Find My tracker.
The first time it got stolen in Berkeley, I recovered it. It hadn't gone far, so the police were able to locate it and the thief.
The second time it got stolen, I couldn't recover it. But I had already bought the Peace of Mind coverage plan, so VanMoof replaced it — and lent me a bike of the same model in the 2 weeks it took to deliver.
If concerns about privacy were widespread enough to stop Google Glass, then surely they would have prevented the mass adoption of always listening, always streaming voice assistant devices.
I think that privacy should be a greater public concern, but I doubt it was the reason why Google Glass failed to catch on.
I recommend the curious to check out DigiD. It's a relatively well-designed SSO for many (if not all?) national and local government services in the Netherlands: personal taxes, business taxes, municipal taxes, trash and water bills, health insurance (trusted private), social benefits, police services, and more.
Agreed. We're overdue for a Magna Carta for our new era, lest we be absolutely ruled by the ever-growing myriad of algorithms and models that govern our participation in society and economy.
I lived in the Netherlands and admired how they offer a SSO service called DigiD for most—if not all—national and municipal services: personal tax, business tax, healthcare, pension, water, garbage, police and many other service portals. Yes, there is a nice online police portal where you can digitally file a police report, get a declaration for insurance, and ask questions.
You also get a digital inbox—Berichtenbox—to organize and centralize all communications from those agencies.
It is difficult to overstate how much life is made better when the government is well-organized and that organization is exposed to you through good UX. I'm now back in the US, it's been 2+ weeks since my renewed passport was supposed to have been mailed to me, and no one at the State Department knows anything.
I think that while your common sense is correct, the title of just "Architect" is protected legally.
To become a licensed Architect, one must have a degree from an NAAB-accredited program, complete 3,740 hours under the guidance of an Architect, and complete a long and difficult 7-part exam.
He can call himself a Software Architect, Information Architect, Technology Architect, or any other variation — but he is not allowed to call himself just Architect and can be sued for doing so.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
> But yeah, it will be a societal cost: one less thing we can trust. Just like "photos don't lie" went out the window with widespread photoshopping, so will trust in personalized videos.
But video is the final frontier of digital trust. Once photos, video, and audio can no longer be trusted, what will people trust?
I recently received a telemarketing robocall that had a convincingly human voice.
It did polite social chitchat quite well.
But there were a few tell-tale signs: the bot would never interrupt or overlap my talking. It would always wait until I finished speaking to parse my speech, and its pauses were very consistent and slightly longer than what was natural.
When I asked it if it were a robot, it replied, "(giggle) why, do I sound like a robot?"
When I threw it a few unconventional questions, it quickly became clear that there was a script.
Technology enables UX. When the underlying technology is commodity—which is often the case—it's easy for competitors to copy the UX. But sometimes UX arises from the tight marriage of design and proprietary technology.
Good UX also arises from good organization design and culture, which aren't easy to copy. Think about a good customer support experience where the first agent you talk with is empowered to solve your issue on the spot, or there's perfect handoff between agents where each one has full context of your customer issue so you don't have to repeat yourself.