💡 Design Insights #19 Designing for Older, How Functional Animation Helps Improve User Experience and More

This is quite unique and a great post if you love robots and cool new gadgets. These devices are always listening. They learn from the words we say and the things we do. And it’s hard to know where this stream of personal information ends up. Who uses it? Is it sold? Can I see it? Will my chuckle at an off-color joke during a stand-up show exist for eternity in a suburban data center? Do I have any control over this multifaceted algorithmic portrait it’s painting of me? A robot talking to itself in the middle of the night is funny. It’s also really spooky. 

These are the skeuomorphs of this new field—think of them as affordances for AI. They’re the spiritual successors to the visual metaphors of early graphical user interfaces, but there’s a big difference between an icon shaped like a trash can and the tilt of a robotic eyebrow. These new affordances don’t show users what they can do with a technology, they describe what a technology won’t do to users: They won’t hurt us, they won’t spy on us, they won’t reveal our secrets. They are literally user-friendly.

An exhibition urges designers to think about how they want to live as they age. How old is “old”? According to a 1,000-person survey completed by London’s Design Museum in conjunction with the pop-up installation New Old, old means 73.

People who run a digital agency that specialises in UX design, automatically playing videos are my pet peeve. They simply aren’t a good thing if you plan to increase your conversion rates. Humans love to be in control. It’s comforting to us. When something unexpected pops up, our primitive intuition senses it as the danger, as that’s how we survived the Dark Ages. The moment users sense “danger” on your website, the trust level goes down — and so do your chances of conversion.

For example, how are Facebook videos that play automatically by default so popular, then? The answer to that lies in expectation. The second example would be the push notifications which can be annoying and can seem like an infringement of privacy. The problem can be solved by allowing users to choose how they would like to be notified.