Linknote — — 138 words

Design — Society

Electric scooter in San Francisco

Adding value, by adding values

Ben Terrett from Public Digital has written something similar to I tried to write last week about designing for society, not just for individuals. Of course, this is much clearer and more succinct than (and written before) mine.

To illustrate the point, the article uses the example of an electric scooter hire scheme in San Francisco:

This is a service where every detail has been designed for the user. It’s unbelievably convenient—for the user alone, and no-one else.

The downside is streets swamped with dumped scooters. There’s nowhere “official” to put them, so like me, no-one knows what to do with a scooter once they’ve finished using it. They just get dumped anywhere.

These scooters are absolutely meeting a user need, but at the expense of a societal need.

Linknote — — 64 words

Culture — Web

Why makers write

This is a bit of a sales pitch, but it is a good piece on the importance of writing regularly.

Deep understanding is necessary for makers. Understanding develops the perspective and conviction needed for bringing products to market. This is why blog-first startups are viable. Writing forces a maker to deeply understand the value they intend to bring into the world.

Linknote — — 87 words

Business — Design — User experience

Desire paths

UX past, present, and future

An enjoyable and informative history of user experience. Some familiar themes, but not entirely your standard take. A reminder that people have been doing something like user-centred design for longer than we sometimes think.

…UX is not really a new thing. It might seem new to your organisation and its design process, but in fact it’s been emerging since before the dawn of the internet, back in the 80s, and people have been looking to solve similar problems for almost 140 years.

Linknote — — 179 words

Technology

Apple's new map

Apple’s new map

I always enjoy Justin O’Beirne’s analysis of how Google Maps and Apple Maps are evolving.

In this post, Justin considers an Apple Maps update that appears to have an insane level of detail. But the further you read, the worse it becomes. The new map has taken Apple four years to make, and covers just 3.1% of the US (an area around — you guessed it — San Francisco).

I risk spoiling the article here. But essentially, a large number of unusual errors and inconsistencies in the map point to much of the new data being manually created.

It all makes me wonder what the point is of having this sort of detail. A picture of a baseball field that the map doesn’t recognise as a baseball field strikes me as pointless. It’s little more than a heavily compressed, coarse vector graphic version of a satellite map. It tells you nothing that the satellite photo couldn’t.

In other words, this superficially impressive update is just that — superficial. Well, I guess it’s Apple after all…

Linknote — — 115 words

Society — User experience — Web

Keeping it weird

Or, more accurately, stopping it being weird. This refers to the problem that most psychology research is conducted on people that are western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.

Tim Kadlec considers the implication this has on our understanding of how people use the web.

We’ve known for a while that the worldwide web was becoming increasingly that: worldwide. As we try to reach people in different parts of the globe with very different daily realities, we have to be willing to rethink our assumptions. We have to be willing to revisit our research and findings with fresh eyes so that we can see what holds true, what doesn’t, and where.