Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

Inherent and acquired diversity

[Capturing a tweet drizzle in a better format.]

There are actually two dimensions to diversity. One is ‘inherent’ diversity in traits such as gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality. Lots of welcome focus on improving this through recruitment practices, addressing bias, etc.

But poor decisions can also stem from a lack of ‘acquired’ diversity: a homogeneity of backgrounds, languages, life experiences. This gets easier as you get older / richer / more senior – more breadth, more travel, more inputs. But it's also a personal responsibility.

So, people of tech: Travel! Learn new languages! Hang with people outside your socioeconomic group! Work abroad! Dabble! You’ll become a more rounded person with broader and more useful perspectives. And you’ll have a lot of fun too.

A 🔒 user wisely points out those are privileged prescriptions. True. But please, friends, broaden your perspectives if and however you can. Because we don’t need more stupid tech decisions caused by a lack of thinking, a lack of perspective. Our industry is going to demand an enormous amount of user trust over the next couple of decades. Let’s start justifying that trust today.

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Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

Past and futures

From this terrible hotel room in this unlovable town, the outlook is bleak. The twin disasters of Brexit and Trump look not just possible but likely. Orlando is still naming its dead. The Euro 2016 football tournament has fractured into violence.

To ascribe common cause is to oversimplify, but in all of these acts I see the influence of the past. The Trump and Leave campaigns alike fixate on restoring former glory. Some people wish so much to deny LGBT people their contemporary freedoms that they will murder to revoke this progress. Even the Russian hooligans have targeted English fans based on a reputation twenty years out of date.

Meanwhile, youth culture continues to fetishise bygone eras, and when the kids grow up they emerge into a thriving mainstream retro culture. Garden parties for the Queen. The infantilisation of adult colouring books. Keep Calm cupcake fascism.

The past has a lot to answer for.

We technologists prefer to focus on the future, sketching out how things might be, wondering how to improve matters both trivial and significant. Imagining bright futures can make us prone to melancholy about the present, and today that sadness feels particularly strong. To see the world take conscious steps to mimic a past that has evaporated (if it ever existed at all) … it’s agonising.

Part of that agony comes from realising it’s partially our fault. We’ve failed to convince millions of people the future will be better. Our intentions and excitement have left people cold, or even hostile, to the extent they would rather chase an impossible reversion.

Progress will always create winners and losers, but we ignore the scary and disenfranchising potential of our work at our peril. What Silicon Valley wants is often not what the wider world needs. The past has a lot to answer for, but then, so does the future.

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Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

Reflections on Japan

The West still looks at Japan in infantile ways. It’s all a bit Early Internet, of an era when user-generated content was viral and heady: look at what those crazy Japanese do. But the wackiness fades quickly and, embarrassed at my inarticulate arigatou gozaimasu arrogance, I find the mistranslations more generous than hilarious, although some are still charming. 

Yes, there’s a street that sells wax food, but it’s knowing – the retailers know it’s a tourist attraction now, so they also sell nigiri keyrings and iPhone cases with tempura protuberances. I head to the Ghibli museum sceptical, fearing queue-for-a-photo-with-Totoro pandering, but the place is detailed and charming. Fragments of Japanese mythology, coal dust, tatami.

We eat well, five-figure blowout and starchy backstreet okonomiyaki alike. My fingers stain with soy and umami, although I draw the line at the fish eyes. We make makizushi and you know, it’s pretty easy. Like brushing a cat, you need more force than you’d think. Mix the rice with a slicing motion, and wipe the knife with each cut. I learn I prefer red miso to white, and that Japanese desserts aren’t for me: too little sweetness and crunch, too much paste. At the tiny Ginza sushi bar I simper as wasabi steam rises in my nose, but the guy has a damn Michelin star so I’m hardly about to disagree with his methods.

There is something about Zen, isn't there? Simplification, purity, doing one thing well: I can see why artists like it. Rituals abound. The tea ceremony is exactly ceremonial, all genuflection and cleaning and not much tea. Do you bow at the temples? I'm not a religious man, and decide it could be insulting to pretend otherwise. But enough people are doing the suggested motions, tossing loose yen into the grate, clapping twice, purifying the air with the bell. What's the difference between a shrine and a temple anyway?

Very little appears to happen by accident. The tarmac is immaculate, emblazened with sturdy ideograms, begging for the glide of streamlined bicycles and heavy suitcases. No lawn is unedged. The Japanese clearly love infrastructure: even the most trivial roadworks employ glowsticked security guards. While we Brits love engineering as historical badge of honour – the first railways, mate! Victorian sewers! – we’ve no interest in doing that kind of thing any more. Tokyo shrugs and lays another kilometre of seductive tarmac.

We buy niknaks that fit our too-small suitcases: stickers, biscuits shaped like pigs, useless soy saucers that fall into the “believe to be beautiful” category. Japan’s precision is infectious, but I know within three months I’ll be my old mess, sticky tape, beer caps and neuroses. I'm not sharp enough for this lifestyle, but that's okay: it's not mine.

Service is deferential and sexless, excepting perhaps Shinjuku's more lurid alleys. My wife’s game attempts to speak Japanese receive gratifying forgiveness. (I’m in France next month, so I enjoy this compassion while I can.) We drink with an ex-pat friend at an Okinawan bar, at which we're offered pickled snake juice, a staff-uniform kimono, and countless cups of sake. We roll out at 1am, the owners pressing business cards into our hands and waving us down the street. At 100 metres we sneak a backward look and, sure enough, they're still waving.

As a tourist, tourists are agonising. We’ve missed the best of the blossom season, but a few late bloomers linger in the parks, smartphonistas crammed in anticipation of Instagram hearts. It seems Chinese tourists are the new American tourists, barking at us to vacate their viewfinders, dressing in tacky polyester kimonos at the shrines, brandishing selfie sticks. I’m cool with selfie culture, but I'm no fan of the me-plus-landmark photo, a pic taken purely for documentation, to confirm presence, rather than for any recognition of beauty.

In our brief countryside stopover, the birds are different. Even the oblate sparrows, probably pests here, are captivating. I spy a yellow wagtail on a power line. I don't know birds, but it was yellow and wagged its tail. Our ryokan’s alpine tranquility is punctured by lingering jetlag and a pillow made of rock. I fidget half asleep, haunted by Suntory Boss's monochromatic face.

Finally, one last night in Toyko. Megacities are really about night-time: the 34th storey views, red eyes blinking on skyscraper shoulders, and advertisements blooming on the horizon like frozen fireworks. The photos never come out right, but I turn the lights off and press my face to the glass. In a gridless city everything below is Escher. I’m paying for the distance, for the vantage that helps me understand a city without having to be a part of it. Even this far up I can hear trains. Yoyogi Park is a blanket of darkness amid the light, and if I hold my gaze, the city really does twinkle.

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Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

What UX Designers Can Learn from Watching a Heron

As UX Designers we face constant challenges. As we wade through the lake of Poor Product Choices we must stalk our users/fish carefully. The path to UX Success demands that we strike with sharp-beaked efficiency – just like a heron I saw today.

So I’m on my honeymoon in Tokyo and we’re walking round a lake. “Do you see that heron?”, my new wife asks. And yes, I see it, but it’s a long way off, so let’s go round the other side to see it better. Except when we get there, I realise it’s a fake: one of those joke herons they put up to scare other birds away, although do herons eat other birds?

My new wife says look, its leg is moving. She’s right. But the heron still looks wooden. Animatronic? Japan does enjoy that sort of thing. No, no, the heron is real. Beak angled toward the water, neck arcing logarithmically, centre of gravity perhaps a foot behind it. A study in potential energy. This bird is about to go apeshit on a fish. I hope for keratinous knives spearing wet scales, a mouth gasping open. So we wait, obliged to witness nature at its most resplendent, most brutal.

A minute passes. The bird remains poised on its stupid legs, taunting gravity. Any moment. Any. Moment. The cliché: the minute you turn away, it’ll strike. Doesn’t matter: we’re going to win this one. Not going to be beaten by a fucking bird. Another minute. Two. Three.

The sun is bright today and my retinas scar over with a heron’s imprint. Tonight I will dream of olive-green bezier bird necks, beaks plucking at my eyes. And it strikes me that this is like UX, somehow.

No phenomena exist except me and the heron: my telekinetic beams versus its magnificent stasis. But… I lose, I lose. I move on. Suns will rise and set, dynasties will fall before this heron unfurls a wing. Later, as I lie in bed and write this glimmering thinkpiece, I deduce that the heron had, be it through genius or plain limbic stimulus-response, redefined the time axis. And thus I reach UX enlightenment.

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Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

What happens next with Conversational UIs

Hey, I have some thoughts about conversational interfaces. They’re kinda predictable, but it’s been a while and your next appointment isn't until 3. Would you like to hear them? Y/N

> yeah ok

Okay so obviously Conversational UIs are hot. I’ll confess that sometimes they can be appropriate and fun.

> you mean slackbot?

Well, yes.

But we both know how our industry responds to a promising idea: we bleed the thing dry. Dribbble saturation, FastCo thinkpieces, conference talks. Within 18 months I expect to be rejecting conversational résumés. Shortly after that, the renunciation. Conversational UIs become passé, discarded. It’ll take perhaps three years before we can at last settle on the only accurate answer to design questions: It Depends.

> whats your point?

The point is conversational UIs are coming, ready or not, relevant or not. Works for one product? Try it for all products! There’ll be some woeful efforts ahead: two-screen onboarding flows that become fifteen-minute dialogical ordeals, etc. The call centre experience, coming to an iPhone near you.

> cute: let me tweet that

I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response.

Haha no but really, that’s worth talking about too. There’ll be all sorts of text-adventure linguistic complexity, and designers aren’t great at textual rigour. Things could get messy. Grammatical entanglement, syntactic opacity, localis(z)ation tripwires.

> arent you being a bit negative

…That’s fair. Okay, there will be some positives.

Conversational UIs will cause some innovation. The Quartz app isn't for me, but isn’t it great to see a refreshing approach in a tired sector? Anything that moves the debate on from how-much-drop-shadow-is-too-much is welcome.

Conversational UIs will also force designers to cosy up to writers, or to become more linguistically literate themselves. Information architects will be trendy again, since syntax and labels are totally their turf.

There’s pleasing alignment with the NoUI theme too, misnamed and oxymoronic though it may be (it really means NoGUI, since of course there’s always an interface). So hopefully conversational UI will advance non-graphical approaches, particularly voice/sound. Text fatigue will set in after a while, and sound could be an ideal I/O method for conversation.

And users could love conversational UIs, at least those done well during the novelty window.

> i sense a but coming

But I worry about what happens when the marketers get stuck in. I mean… some of my best friends and all that, but marketers can’t resist an opportunity to force a damn relationship on you.

Truth is, I don't want to talk to most of my products. They’re dumb utilities. Close and forget. I want a spade, not the experience of digging. 

The inflationary language of UX has already loaded commodity products with self-importance; conversational UI will make it worse. Apps will bloom with personality, but in the mould way rather than the flower way. That patronising first-person tone, previously quarantined in App Store notes and FMCG packaging — it’s going to infect the core of digital products. Products will get chatty. They’ll want to be your buddies. They’ll insist on being called by names

> that reminds me, youve actually been saying my name wrong this whole time

…and you can bet those names will be sexist too: female for administrative services, male for analytical ones. Think it’s hard enough to remember real people’s names? Now you can experience that with your tech too. You’re out of washing powder: is it Alice or Rita you need to tell?

> yeah, its actually pronounced Kenn-ith by the way

Oh well look actually I have to go, sorry. Talk to you later, all right Senid?

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Cennydd Bowles Cennydd Bowles

Edge cases (part 1 of hundreds…)

What if their surname only has two letters?
Are we sure that button is big enough for translated text?
What if the user doesn’t have JavaScript on?
Can a colourblind user still understand that?
What happens when network connection drops?
Does this drag-and-drop work properly on a touchscreen?
What if a user receives an abusive message in this inbox?
“You have no friends.” What now?
Your server had a glitch: does the user understand what happened?
Is that target big enough for all users to tap?
What if the CDN takes a while?
Does that field work for people with non-binary genders?
Could someone just build a bot to get around this?
What if the browser is zoomed in?
What if they want to paste from a password manager?
Did you remember that for Amex the CCV is 4 digits long?
Have we tested with VoiceOver?
Wait, couldn’t this become a spam vector?
Does this even load on a 2G connection?
What if the user can’t point with a mouse?
We are stripping hyphens and parentheses from this telephone field, right?
Does that wrap okay?
Oops! They didn't mean to click that: what do they do now?
Doesn’t Apple hold the patent on that?

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