14 tweets · June 2020 · 37 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Design & blame thread 🧵 Was wondering why I'd recently accidentally discarded a few tweets and then I realized that twitter recently changed the X / esc popup so that now it looks like this ↙️ Whereas it used to look like ↘️ (threads aren't saveable) Now very obvious why 🤯
Many people would feel shame or a sense of clumsiness about having made such an error. I noticed surprise when it first happened, then a *different* kind of surprise when it happened the second time, then today I was like 🤨👀😒🤔 then managed to guess the above had happened.
And I was right! But I was genuinely unsure that this was it, until I saw that it was still the same with threads. This is the equivalent of your car suddenly and without warning swapping the brake pedal and the gas pedal. And sure, they're labelled, but you're not LOOKING.
This sort of change now happens all the time, especially since we all live in this world where technology updates itself without even announcing it. It can be unsettling. medium.com/@Malcolm_Ocean…
It's common for people to respond to this with blame. A recent case study: Insight Timer recently updated its Android app, and in the process seems to have thrown out user timer presets for over a million users! So you start your timer, but there's no ding at the start... huh?
My response, when this happened to me, was exasperated & angry 🙄 I've long had a beef about how designers rarely think about the actual experience users might have; although they might be fixated on a concept of "UX" as a thing to optimize. Outward blame 🤬 "they fucked up"
Next day, a friend of mine encountered the same thing, and even though I'd just been ranting about the redesign, her instinctive response when the app behaved differently than usual was shame—she was used to being labelled the stupid one. Inward blame 😳 "I fucked up"
Neither of these responses is particularly useful or creative. I certainly feel glad I've tended to have the former rather than the latter, but it's still blame and blame doesn't make sense. (blame isn't blameworthy, just confused, like geocentrism)
Yet despite knowing intellectually that blame doesn't make sense I still felt unsafe not blaming, when confronted with bad design. After years of exploring this… - I still don't fully understand why - & it's still not completely transformed but I've had insights & a shift
Recently had an emotional breakthrough with this. Three key things happened: 1. While doing some BioEmotive with @SarahAMcManus holding space, I realized a lot of my bad-design blame was guarding a sense of feeling Alone, alien (that other people didn't seem to Get It)
2. I started to find others who Get It and collect them here on my "Deep Design" twitter list. If I feel alone, I can just walk by the open-garage of any of these people... and so even just *knowing* I can do that makes me feel less alone. twitter.com/i/lists/125671…
3. Started to feel that others could recognize that I Get It. Tweets like this one from @Conaw were part of that, along with other exchanges where people whose work I respect deeply appreciated my design perspective on it.
Meta to those 3 things, and utterly vital: I actually let all of this sink in. Just collecting the list or getting validation from others wouldn't automatically change how I felt about it. Had to juxtapose the scared-alone-angry me with new reality.
So, it seems I now feel: - more spacious about "bad" design - less alone - possibly less guarded on some other level (vaguely thinking "Worthless" core feeling might be involved) It's hard to tell as I've got deep emotional & cultural learning happening on many levels at once!
