Migration voes

My previous phone was getting long in the tooth, and there was no way to get call recording to work on it, so I bit the bullet the second I saw that Nothing 2A was supported call recording out of the box. It’s bigger than I’d like, but I just have to live with the fact that everyone is OK with carrying tablets around for now.

And because I have a whole bunch of applications and more than one email, I have now spent half a day logging in to different services, trying to get 2FA to work and requesting new passwords, migrating chats and files, cursing all the while. So many parking apps – I hate you with a burning passion!

I thought that Bank ID (Swedish national 2FA application) would be a hassle to renew, but it was as straightforward as you’d please. It’s the FAANG apps that are giving me a headache – there’s no standard way of migrating the stuff, each app has come up with it’s own authentication scheme requiring some particular set of hoops to be jumped. Some apps were difficult to get to work I’ve uninstalled them rather than deal with the hassle. It’s a culling criteria as good as any, I guess.

Even though some people love the Nothing 2.5 launcher, it looks like a half-finished Winamp skin so I installed Nova despite how slow it can be at times. I look forward to when I can forego a cellphone alltogether and manage all my digital interactions with a ring or something less attention-requiring, but until then I’ll go for a utalitarian approach – my phone is not my personality.

I’m occasionally surprised how utter shit the usability of both mobiles and computers still is though! I’m sure part of it is just nostalgia and selective memory on my part, but I honestly miss the days of MacOS 9 and Nokia phones. Todays UI consistency is poor, the information architecture is muddled, and some design choices are just baffling. The CoverOverflow animation on Android is nauseating and can’t be turned off? The menu for editing apps is ordered differently from one app to another (see screenshot)? Why are app names truncated?

Of course, as a budding UX:er I ought to be encouraged: Look how much there’s left to do! But on the other hand, I’m sure there are designers smarter than I – whole scores of them in fact! – who have tried to wrestle these things under control and failed. The digital world stands testament to their failed ambitions, cobbled together from tear-stained post-its and angry PM comments in a shared Figjam board.

Full of worthless energy

Crushed daddy-longlegs

I sleep with a notebook next to my bed, and sometimes I wake up with an idea, more often a turn of phrase or a slogan, and write it down. This particular morning I wrote “I woke up rested, full of worthless energy”.

The type of energy I was thinking of was the kind that makes your head buzz with potential to solve problems – your mind is racing to apply itself to something. A problem to solve, a task to fulfill. A purpose, any purpose.

But if you don’t find a purpose, this energy, this pressure, dissapates – much like a kettle boiling over, the energy escapes as steam, as sighs and hot breath. I only keep as much energy as needed for the mundane tasks of the day, the rest leaks out.

Reading, 2023

Oik oik fellow piglets! I’m starting this post January 9th in the year of our lord 2023. I have a slight cold, my calfs are aching after ill-advised amount of exercise yesterday, and I’m looking forwards to the school semester starting again. Just like previous years, I’m scheduling this post to go live 1st Jan 2024, and I’ll track what books (and similar) I’ve read, in chronological order. My prediction is that a lot will be stuff related to school and work, but I’ll try to squeeze some fiction in there as well – and not only re-reads… (I’ll list stuff I’ll give up on as well)

Books read

Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth. Odd science fantasy book taking place in a world where there are necromantic houses who rule whole planets in service to an emperor? We get to follow Gideon, an indentured servant to the Ninth house, when she along with her necromancer are summoned to perform a test with representatives of other houses. It’s the language which makes this stand apart – Gideon talks like a contemporary angry teenager, which clashes wonderfully with the gothic surroundings. The mood reminds me of the backdrops of the game Slay the Spire, if that makes any sense.

Alan Cooper: The inmates are running the asylum. A book often referenced in modern computer design litterature as an important contribution in bridging the divide between design and development. Well written by the “father of Visual Basic” and as pertinent today as it was thirty years ago.

Mark van Wageningen: Type and Color: How to design and use multicolored typefaces. More of a skim than a read – the author presents some experiments with typefaces made up of more than one colour. It’s not a subtle effect and using it for copy text would require a brave publisher, but some of the headers are eye-catching if they fit with the overall design.

Zach Barth: Zach-like. A chronological history of the games of Zach Barth and his companies. It’s not many persons who get a genre names after themselves (zach-like) so it’s intersting to browse the evolotion from paper sketches to finished computer games. Could have done with tighter editing of text and included materials, but I have a feeling I’m not the intended audience – a burgeoning game developer might spend days analysing the sketches I browse through.

Sjöwall Wahlöö: Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle. The first book from the Beck series that I’ve read, and I can see how it became so genre-defining. It’s suspensful, has social pathos and a no-nonsense story – great read. (Oh, and the story is about a brutal murder of a police officer, which starts to look like the first of a string of revenge killings – and our protagonist Beck is on the list)

Seth Dickinson: The tyrant Baru Cormorant. Originally the final volume of the trilogy, but since extended to a planned forth book, we follow Baru Cormorant and her dealings in trying to exert vengenge upon the imperial Falcrest. Well written and deep characters; It’s Machiavellian economic warfare, and my only complaint is that the characters are too numerous and difficult for my poor brain to keep apart. Will preorder the forth book as soon as it’s possible though!

Frederik Pohl, The boy who would live forever. Continuing the stories in the Heechee saga, there’s a menagerie of vignettes and characters which tie together many of the storylines from the other Gateway novels. Pohl has original ideas like few others – what he uses as a throwaway tidbit or worldbuilding, lesser authors would use as their main contrivance. The books becomes somewhat disjointed because of this, but it’s always fun to visit in the universe. I particularly enjoy comparing the AI minds of Gateway to the Minds of Iain M. Banks Culture series – the Gateway minds seem much more beign and less cynical than their Culture counterparts.

Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Part of my UX reading, Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples. Still, it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this – if we consider stress responses as conditions similar to handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.

John le Carré: A murder of Quality. One of his early whodunnits featuring George Smiley, and a biting description of upper class private schools in England. A woman is found murdered and suspicion falls on her husband, Smiley investigates and Carré uses him as a foil onto which we can project the banal wickedness of seemly proper breeding and behaviour. A fun and short read.

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus. An urgent and timely book looking at what many of us feel – we’ve become more stupid and distracted with each passing year. Starting out with surveillance capitalism and attention economy – manufactured to milk our brains as much as possible – he moves on to pollutants, malnurishment and a sheltered and scripted childhood as possible culprits to your shrinking attention-span. Good read, altough some arguments are weaker than other (the Silicon Valley stuff is solid though).

Michael Luca, Max H Bazerman: The power of experiments. A great primer on how the field of experimentation and nudging has moved from academia into politics and business. The authors are hilariously naïve and reductive though – the only objections they can envision to being experimented upon is either being a luddite or fear of bad actors (which are considered an abboration rather than business as usual). Despite this it’s a worthwhile read – and their attitude is informative as well, since it explains the oblivious surprise organisations show when people object to being experimented upon.

Louise Boije af Gennäs: Blodloka. A Swedish whodunnit against a backdrop of political scandals and coverups from the last sixty years. Reasonably suspenseful, but reads like something the author has seen on tv and is retelling rather than a well written novel. But I became intrigued to read more about the real-world scandals that are referenced in clippings throughout the book, so that’s a plus.

Oliver Sacks: An anthropoligist on Mars. Seven short descriptions of people with neurodivergence – aquired colour blindness, tourettes, inability to create memories – all told in Sacks curious and frank voice. The title is a quote from autist savant Temple Grandin on how she feels when navigating human relations, but serves just as well to describe how the author approaches his subjects on their terms as far as possible, bring back stories to the rest of us.

Gina Spadafori: Dogs for dummies. I’m more or less come to terms that if I and Sara are to stay together, at some point we’ll get a dog. So I figured I’d take an interest and read up on the subject. This book was a good primer on how to approach the decision to get a dog, what to look for in a breader, house training, etc. Very practical, and she highlights the responsibility one has for not encouraging “puppy mills.” I’m still not comfortable with the idea of owning a dog, but at least I’m more informed!

Hugh C. Howey: Silo trilogy. A re-read after watching the mediocre tv-adaptation. Ten thousand people live underground in a giant silo, but noone remembers why. The only thing they know is what The Order commands them, and it commands them not to go outside. Nice dystopic scifi with some twists and turns.

Albert Camus: The Fall. Short and fantastic, a monologue seemingly adressing the reader in second person. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is judge-penitent in a bar in Amsterdam, sometime in the 1950s, and he’s telling his interlocutor of his fall from social and moral grace, and of the impossibility of being noble. Looking forwards to reading this again in a while!

Lev Manovich: AI Aesthetics. A short booklet which is part of the course AI & Design that I’m taking at Borås University fall of 23. It came out 2018 and there’s not much conceptually new here that hasn’t been covered elsewhere by now, but it’s a useful summery of cultural ontologies and where AI fits in the puzzle.

E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops. A fantastic short story from 1909 which seem so in time with our current age it’s bound to get a resurgence! “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.” Choc full of quotes and insights into a future world enslaved by the machine.

Malka Older: Infomocracy. A near future scifi where the world is mostly divided into administative areas comprised of a maximum of 100’000 citizens. Each such centenal can be ruled by completely different rules – be they communist, laizze faire, utalitarian – and we follow political fixers in the run-up to the coming contested election. It’s a mildly interesting setup, but poorly written and not paticularly interesting in the end. I read it on a recommendation from a co-worker at RISE, and would have abandoned it otherwise.

Hannes Råstam: Fallet Thomas Quick. A fascinating read about the formerly convicted serial killer Thomas Quick who confessed to 30-some murders, was convicted for eight of them. After twenty years in bin he was exonerated after Hannes Råstam starts digging into the cases and slowly uncovers that it’s all based on wishful thinking and willful ignorance on the part of the prosecution and lawyers, and false confessions by Quick. A riveting read and a testament to the need for research-heavy journalism.

Betty Gilpin: All the women in my brain. An autobiography by the actress written with more metaphors and allegories than I’ve seen anywhere. It tells of her struggles with imposter syndrome, angst, fear of failure and fear of success. Gilpin was great in The Hunt and the more recent Mrs Davis, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of her road there. Great read, even if you don’t usually read autobiographies. “I have spent my life lily-pad hopping from goddess to goddess, quietly plagiarizing their toe rings and credos, hoping that my mirroring would count as personhood”

Fredrik T Olsson: Slutet på kedjan. A Swedish sci-fi thriller about a world conspiracy, a battle against time and some really awkward speculation about junk DNA. Poorly written and completely unbelievable characters and worldbuilding, and a perfect schlock to read when you’re down with a cold and have little energy to spare. One blurb on the cover says “more intelligent and better written than Da Vinci Code” which is a hilariously low bar to clear, which I’m not sure that this novel actually manages. No surprise at all that it’s been optioned for a film by Warner Brothers.

Books given up on

Lauren Beriant: Cruel optimism. Gave up after 34 of 354 pages when I realised that I didn’t understand what the point of the book was.

Louise Penny: Glass Houses. It’s like turning on a show which you imagine has been going for twenty years and realising that you don’t care about the characters at all. I did read another book in the series on Saras recommendation, but it’s just not for me. Put it down after 22/330 pages.

V.E.Schwab: A darker shade of magic. Dimension-hopping between different Londons. The language just didn’t grip me, and there are better magic realism books out there. 23/345 pages.

Timothy Morton: Dark Ecology. My patience with philosophical books which claim to reinvent ontologies and discourse – preferably inventing clever words in the process – grows shorter with age. I got through 17/220 pages of this book.

Charles Stross: Halting State. In a near future someone commits a bank robbery in a virtual world, and it has real world repercussions as insurence adjusters get involved. Found the book abandoned at RISE, and I abandoned it half way through.

AI as an accellerator of bad/good but mostly bad

“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”

Rest of world, Victoria Turk: How AI reduces the world to stereotypes

A fantastic comparison of how Midjourney renders five terms: a person, a woman, a house, a street, and a plate of food. It comes out as stereotyped as you can imagine, but the work they put in to do the comparison really shows it in stark light.

In that dismal moment I could feel that the systems meant to process us haven’t “gone wrong” when they embarrass us. They aren’t being refined toward some higher level of seamlessness, once the technology and the data sets improve. Rather they “improve” by relocating the frictions we inevitably feel and giving it no outlet. The indifference of these systems to us and our powerlessness in the face of them in that moment becomes the indifference of society and our powerlessness to change it. In a flash, the welling irritation conveys instantly, reflexively, that solidarity must be impossible in a world where all human relations are machine-mediated.

Rob Horning: Two riders were approaching

This sentence explains more peotically what I wrote a while back: “… it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.”

Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free. Fauxtomation strikes again. […] But while the gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible, fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.

Astra Taylor: The faux-bot revolution

We are so primed for a technologically advanced future that we’re bluepilling ourselves into accepting fake automation as real. There is a man behind the curtain, and it’s us?

The largest corporations on earth ripped off generations of artists without permission or compensation to produce programs meant to rip us off even more. I believe A.I. defenders know this is unethical, which is why they distract us with fan fiction about the future.

New Republic, Lincoln Michael: The year AI came for culture

A great essay that puts the AI wars into a power perspective – technology used to extract labour and gain regulatory capture. Haves against have-nots. As usual. A very down to earth summery for the year 2023.

Is having control better than having control surfaces?

A while back I calculated my computational power according to screen estate, offering the suggestion that the more I can see (up to a point) at the same time, the more function I can extract from my computers information systems. Before that I’d done a similar thing going through how many gigabytes of storage I had personal control over, the thought being that it described the circumfence of my binary domains. The more storage, the more video I could edit, the more photos I could save, and the more high resolution pirated movies I could keep on hand.

I came to think of this again the other day when I started my migration from many computers onto a home system built around a small M1 Macbook Air. It’s a humble machine which is more powerful than my sort-of-recent i9/1080Ti Windows abomination, and much more powerful than the 5.1 Mac Pro I’m still keeping around because of the RAID and I/O ports, and I’m consolidating all the storage onto a few external enclosures. Turns out, I have some fifteen drives of different capacity laying around, as well as a bunch of USB/Firewire enclosures, and just copying the stuff from one thing to another takes forever right now.

But anywho, my point being that the amount of storage I have no longer feels like a valuable metric of my productive capacity – rather the opposite since my data exists as conflicting versions in many places – and I’m satisfied with my screen real estate (well almost, I’d like a magic whiteboard covering 2×1 meters on the living room wall). So what qualities do I value in my personal computational space today?

I’m thinking that maybe it’s convenience. I’ve become older, crankier wiser, and neither my eyesight nor patience can take as much abuse as it was able to ten years ago. I want to be able to be productive rather than fiddle around with drivers in Windows and I’m more likely to take poor design as a personal affront than a technical challange.

There’s that William Morris quote that you should “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” and perhaps there’s something similar going on here, with a very wide definition of “beautiful” and “useful”. Along those lines, I caved in and bought an iPad to read books on since I tried one out and realised how much slicker the experience is than on any Android tablet I’ve tried.

It’s not that I want a frictionless life. Friction is important, it smooths out rough surfaces, gives us things to hang on to, and provides heat and sparks. But I’d like to choose my objects of friction with more consideration.

There are so many things worth doing in the world, small and grand, and there’s just so little value in putting up with stuff that doesn’t matter. Just write that stuff off and learn to live with the fomo; Smooth out all friction that doesn’t improve your grip on reality, and enjoy a better handle on life.

What’s all this UX then?

My first internship at RISE is coming to an end, and with that I’m going back to school for two more courses this year – before heading out for a 16 week intership somewhere (Suggestions? Hit me up!). In additon to doing full time at ITHS, I’ve been doing a bunch of courses at IxDF, and studying AI and applied design at Borås Univeristy. While at the same time trying to have a life, which has proven to be a bit stressfull.

I’m thinking a lot about what my place is in the whole “design ecology” – what do I enjoy doing, and what can I reasonably get paid for? I know that I’d like to end up in a creative team where we help each other be awesome and solve difficult problems for real people and dazzle others with out brilliance, but I have a way to go before I’m there. So I end up reading stuff written by people more clever and experienced than I, and I try to figure out what it’s all about. And since I have Some Thoughts™️ I figured I might as well post it here for others (and myself, later) to read.

It’s tempting to think that audiences are coming to our content with the basic skills needed to comprehend and interpret it. That may simply not be the case. Part of “consider[ing] your content from your user’s perspective” is understanding what reading skills the user brings to the equation and writing to accommodate them.

Contents Magazine, Angela Colter: The audience you didn’t know you had

According to Colters article above, around half of the population of the USA has low or very low literacy skills. I spent a couple minutes searching for Swedish statistics, but could only find trend-pieces on reading habits among kids.

Design takeaway: Make sure that text in your text is easy to scan and understand. If you have reasons to be more obscure, have a clear goal and be aware of that you’re potentially excluding users. Useful tool: LIX calculator (then again, readability calculators might not be all that reliable)

And them we have colour blindness as a visual design problem which in turn causes cognitive load.

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable? 

Andy Baio: Chasing rainbows

Try to imagine a vast field of one color in your mind. No other colors. No other words. No other thoughts. No connotations. No connections. No anything except for that one color. You can’t do it. You seriously CAN’T do it. The human brain does not allow you to do it. It does not work. It simply does not.

Hoot design company: Color Psychology is Bullsh*t

We’ve covered colour psychology very briefly at the UX Design course at ITHS, and the idea that certain colours have certain meaning irks me no end. It’s a reductionist view of how colours and perception works, and it’s just plain dumb. “Red means action” and “blue inspires confidence.” It’s like crystal therapy for the aesthetically challenged – “ooh, this mauve will inspire romance.”

The same goes for the ITHS classes we’ve had on typography, where we suddenly abandon concepts such as “testing legibility” in favour of “the golden ratio should decide line height.” I understand that you have to convince those paying you that the two days you spent fiddling with the typography weren’t wasted, but refering to some obscure magic incantation passed down from Gutenberg will bite on the ass once you’re asked “but why can’t we just get the AI to do it?”

John Denver learned the biggest lesson of all, even if he only had a few seconds to appreciate it: Let the User Beware! And, indeed, the NTSB, as per its long history of setting aside findings, human factors or otherwise, that might conflict with a verdict of pilot error, ruled that the responsibility for this crash lay with the pilot. The interface was relegated to a mere “factor.” Had John Denver fueled his aircraft in spite of evidence indicating he had sufficient fuel, had he somehow managed to thoroughly familiarize himself with the idiosyncrasies of this uniquely-assembled experimental aircraft sans manual, he would be alive and well today.

Bruce Tognazzini: When Interfaces Kill: What Really Happened to John Denver

And these are the kind of stories that get retold by old-timers in the Human Computer Interface / User Centered Design / UX field. The stories that tell us that people are too often blamed for what should be blamed on poor design and the business practices that allow it.

Retold in a more modern way, the deaths caused by poor design are today more likely to be the result of dark patterns, uncaring machine learning or just general “death by a thousand cuts.”

Related book recommendation: Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples.

Despite that it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this. If we could consider stress responses as temporary handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.

Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts — had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects.

Rebecca Ackermann: Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

Ackermanns article is interesting as it’s taking to task the too-naive approach to all problems that IDEO et.al occasionally present. It struck me as I was listening to a conversation with Tim Brown the other day (one of the head honchos at IDEO), when he was somewhat contrite about having spent so many years of his professional life “designing and bringing about landfills” – and now he wants to make a better impact on the world (viz. environmental issues).

Much like Don Norman is now focusing on “design for a sustainable world,” to my ears they ignore that any ambition to take on these huge global issues will run afoul of realpolitik – it’s not because of poor design decitions that we have global warming; it’s because there are exceptionelly rich and vested interests in whose interest it is not to prioritize the public good. And I don’t know how to have a discussion about “making the world better” without at least acknowledging the power dynamics.

When the thing that propels a career, animates hobbies, and becomes a mode of communication are the all same, there are drawbacks. For one, my sense of worth and accomplishment is less diverse. When the market, the end users, my friends, or my family don’t appreciate or acknowledge when I show them I love them, it can hurt. I’ll admit it. It is easy to feel like I don’t matter. But then, I have always been sensitive. I am working on that. I am also getting a lot of opportunities to practice.

T. Robert Roeth: When you start to doubt yourself, design from the inside out

A well written essay on self-doubt and a creative career. It resonated quite a lot with how I think of myself as a human and artists, and I imagine that it’ll stay relevant now that I’m moving into UX Design. Robert writes about how he overcompensated in his work in order to increase both his financial worth and self-worth, but felt like he was faking it and failing at adulting.

Trying to identify what it is that makes you tick, and what parts of you that you should cultivate rather than prune, is a struggle for us neurotic types. I don’t expect that it’ll get easier once I start working in the design field, but I’m trying to prepare – and reading essays on similar issues is a comfort.

Making of a UX designer

In the fall of 2022 I began studying UX Design at IT-högskolan. The field was new to me and I did my best to navigate the concepts, methods and nomenclatures. I wished I could talk to people who were just a bit further along than I – ask them what I should focus on, what I shouldn’t stress about, and how their careers had turned out.

I did run into a whole bunch of nice people at school, at meetups and other professional forums, but I would have liked the info available in one place, and I wish I had a map of the terrain ahead. I don’t have a mentor in the field, so finding others who are ahead of me seemed like the next best thing.

This project was born out of a hope that perhaps those that come after me can benefit from the experience of myself and my classmates. I did an open call to my class of UX22 at ITHS and asked to interview as many as possible after our first year of school. My plan is to follow this up three years after our graduation, and then three years after that – in 2027 & 2030.

Out of my class of 30 odd people, I got 11 to volunteer, and I’d like to thank them all for entrusting me with their time and thoughts. The interviews are in Swedish, but the videos have English auto-translated subs (in addition to manually translated Swedish) so I hope that they can be useful for others outside of Sweden.

The questions I asked each one were the same, but I did edit the thing for brevity and omitted some of the answers. I’ve pasted all the questions below:

  • Who are you and what’s your background?
  • Describe UX Design to someone who doesn’t know.
  • What distinguishes a good UX Designer?
  • What makes you a good UX designer?
  • Why did you decide to study UX Design?
    • What was appealing about it?
    • Is it still appealing?
    • Has your understanding of what UX Design is changed?
  • Describe something you’re are proud of during your first year.
  • What has been challenging in your first year?
  • If you could advise yourself before you began studying, what would you say?
  • What would you like to work with after graduation?
  • Is there anything you’d rather not work with?
  • Describe a typical workday in spring 2027.
    • How will you get there?

I hope these interviews provide some insights and encouragement to others who are just starting out on their UX design journey. It’s been interesting to speak with my classmates and document their thoughts and ambitions at this early stage of our careers. I look forward to continuing the conversation and documenting how our perspectives evolve over time.

I welcome any feedback on this project or suggestions for future iterations. Please feel free to leave a comment below or get in touch – I’d love to hear from you: emaillinkedin

Thanks for joining me on this small attempt to map the unknown terrain ahead!

What’s wrong with UX – the binger aversion guide

When I started studying UX Design in the long ago time-before-time (fall of 2022) I promised myself that I’d abandon all other projects and cut back on distracting reading – giving myself time and energy to focus on the studies. This worked well for a week or so.

Turns out there are whole books written on ethnography, design and usability, and they are rather interesting – who knew! Anyway, I quickly got bogged down with extra courses and books and podcasts and so on and so forth. I took to walking an hour and a half to school just to have time to speed-listen to at least some of the stuff that’s out there.

Screengrab of six images from my Instagram account
Some images from my Instagram which gets no love. Go follow!

One of the podcasts that I stuck to was “What is wrong with UX,” hosted by Laura Klein and Kate Rutter. It’s now defunct, but the archive is still up at usersknow.com/podcast. Since I’ve listened to all 130 or so episodes I figured that I’d put together a selection most interesting to me as a beginner in the field. The show doesn’t rely much on callbacks, so skipping episodes isn’t that big of a deal.

An assumption about you: The selected episodes were useful as a complement to my full time UX Design studies – they gave a deeper understanding of the practicalities of what I was learning in school and reading about on the side. I’m assuming that this podcast isn’t your first exposure to the field of UX Design.

A note for us non-USA people: Americans love to talk and this podcast is no exception, but after an episode or two you’ll be able to look past the dad-jokes and forced geniality, and appreciate the content. Klein and Rutter are knowledgeble and passionate about their skills, and it’s worth sticking with the show to hear what they have to say. As a side note, I can recommend Laura Kleins book UX for lean startups as well as her course in Agile methods for UX Design over at IxDF [affiliate link].

The shows listed are in order of publication, and the descriptions are their own.

  • C-FWOTS: Kate and Laura talk about C-FWOTs or Colossal Fucking Wastes of Time. What makes a design project a C-FWOT, and how can we avoid them?
  • Don’t be a UX Designer: In this episode, Kate and Laura bitch about some of the most annoying things about being a UX Designer and do everything in our power to keep you from becoming one. You’ll thank us later.
  • The Worst Clients: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about terrible clients (no, not by name. we’re not committing career suicide just yet.) and how we can deal with them better as UX Designers. If you work with other people as a UX Designer, this one might be helpful. If you have worked directly with clients, consider this a possible trigger warning.
  • 6 Things We Wish We Had Known: Kate and Laura talk about the things we wish we’d learned earlier in our careers as UX Designers.
  • Stop Arguing with Feedback: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss how to take the feedback you asked for a little more graciously and maybe even benefit from it. Do not, in any way, think that this is a request for you to give feedback to Kate and/or Laura. Yes, we understand the irony, and no, we’re not having any of it.
  • Why You Should Care about the Business Model: In this episode, Kate and Laura give five reasons why everybody, even designers and researchers, need to understand how their products and companies make money.
  • Collaborative Design: In this episode, Kate and Laura fight about what it means to design things collaboratively and the ways in which everybody seems to screw it up. Hint: collaborative design does not mean everybody makes every single decision together! This is not a democracy, people.
  • Old Research Stories: In this week’s episode, Kate and Laura reminisce about old research stories and how much better things were before. Ok, mostly they talk about what’s still true of the things they learned in old research and what’s changed.
  • Starting Your Own Thing: In this episode, Kate and Laura give sketchy advice about starting your own freelancing or consulting business. Reminder: you should probably not take legal advice from drunk people on the internet.
  • Designing Beyond the Screen: In this episode, Kate and Laura complain about screen-based designers again. They also talk about designing for multi-modal interfaces in a failed attempt to sound modern and like they haven’t been doing this since the Paleolithic Era.
  • Choosing the Right Deliverables: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about not wasting time making the wrong stuff. You’ll be completely unsurprised that what sorts of deliverables you should make for your team depends entirely on who you’re making stuff for and what you want out of it.
  • Whiteboard Challenges: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how to be better at whiteboard challenges if you can’t avoid them entirely, which you can’t, so just deal.
  • Protect Your Users froom Each Other: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how and why to protect your users from each other while they slowly lose what little faith they still had in humanity. Happy New Year.
  • Craft: In this episode, Kate and Laura argue about The Craft, which relates to neither witchcraft nor macrame owls, so honestly why do they even bother? Seriously though, tune in for 30 minutes of blathering about what words mean.
  • Should Designers Lead: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss something (semi) topical. They argue about whether designers should lead and then of course somehow veer into what design even is anyway and it’s pretty much a typical mess.
  • Tips for New UX Designers: In this episode, Kate and Laura attempt to give advice to new UXers (something neither of them has been since dinosaurs roamed the earth). Laura advocates violence, surprising nobody who has ever met her.
  • Design Principles: In this episode, Kate and Laura take a decidedly unprincipled look at design principles. Kate proves that drinking does, in fact, affect your memory, when she completely forgets Laura’s entire work history.
  • Designing in Triples: Kate explains why she likes to make everything three times as hard as it needs to be. If you’re playing the What is Wrong with UX drinking game and drinking every time they mention Task Flows, then maybe don’t make any plans for after the podcast.
  • High Level UX Jobs: In this episode, Kate and Laura really go off the rails talking about the similarities, differences, and issues with various different higher level UX jobs, many of which they haven’t actually held in well over a decade, if at all.

If you’ve listened to the podcast and would like to suggest another episode to add to the list – or one to take away – feel free to comment below of get in touch over at Linkedin or email. And if you know of other curated lists of podcast episodes, let me know! The amount of info that’s available online is massive, and with all search engines being choked with listicles written by drunk potato AI:s and content farms, finding the good stuff is time-consuming.

Everything is fandom now

The title phrase and sentiment is taken from plagiarist & internet commentator Ryan Brodericks newsletter Garbage Day, but it might as well be one of the conclusions of an Adam Curtis documentary.

My childhood friend Matilda visited us in Gothenburg over the weekend, chaperoning her son who had a ticket to the three-day festival Way out West, and we binged most of Curtis series “Can’t get you out of my mind.” I still have the last hour of the last episode to go (“brevity” isn’t a word in his vocabulary I think), but the overarching theme of the disappearance of progressive ideologies is depressing and on point. What we’re left with after the fall of the democratic middle class & militant romantics, are fandoms jockying for position and angry people longing for a past that never were.

This is a recurring theme in stuff I’m reading as well as in conversations. It’s not so much despair as resignation. Despair would imply that you have a goal but have failed to attain it. Resignation is when you realise that your goal doesn’t matter. And resignation seems to colour the zeitgeist quite thoroughly right now – the only remaining optimists are the religious fundamentalists and accelerationist of different stripes.

One of the ideas I floated to my friends after the last election (which saw a right-nationalist government take over from the previous centrists) was that we ought to start a political party which only focuses on one issue. This in itself isn’t new – there are populist parties and movements all the time – but I’m interested in what issue might give the biggest progressive leverage regardless of the political colour one has to collaborate with.

Worst case scenario: What single-issue would make such a disproportional progressive impact that it would be worth to collaborate even with the most toxic idiots of the far right? You’re sitting at the negotiating table with a bunch of wannabe nationalist socialist romatics from SD, and if they give in on one issue you’ll lend them your support. What would that issue be?

Depending on if we’re doing this locally, regionally or nationally, the issues will differ. Right now I only have two suggestions: A complete ban on private car use in the inner city of Gothenburg (a local issue) or a hard limit on the salary for public employees (with countermeasures in place for attempts to subvert this via bonuses, etc.). Both would have huge knock-on effects, which on the face of it would be progressive (citation needed).

Do you have any other suggestions for one law, policy, activity or ordinance that would have a disproportionally progressive effect regardless of which political coalition is in power? I’m all ears, let’s do this! There’s only three years left and we probably need to make some research and print some leaflets!

Reading and doing

I’m back from a short vacation to Side (Turkey) which I spent reading and drinking beer. Also, looking at ruins. Side is an odd place where a contemporary charter tourist village has sprung up literally built on top of 2000 year old ruins. As a result, you see ancient brickabrack all over the place – they use marble columns as doorstops – which in another context would be in a museum.

Anywho. Since I’m reading a lot (mostly related to my UX studies) I’m starting to feel mentally constipated. I need to put some of the stuff into practice, or I’m going to forget it, which seems a waste of my time. So: Going forward I’ll pursue some simple ideas/projects/experiments to implement what I learn from the books (as well as the IxDF courses I’m taking on the side), but with a rule not to turn them into huge projects or guilt-tripping obligations – I’m just doing it to experiment, learn and get feedback. Sounds like fun?

Speaking of which, I’m thinking of tidying this blog up a bit. Adding some “best of” posts in the left column and maybe even have categories of some sort. I know my readership here is in the single digits, but I ought to be able to use some material to inform a professional profile – my approach to work, research, thinking, etc. If you have opinions, get in touch through mail or on Linkedin.