Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 42

ReCoil

On the Coil developers site there���s a page proudly answering the question who is web monetized?

You���ll some familiar sites in there: CSS Tricks, A List Apart, and even this humble website, adactio.com.

But lest you think that this social proof is in any way an endorsement, I should probably clarify what my experience with Coil has been like.

Coil itself is grand. You get an identifier and you add it to your website in a meta element, much like you would do with indie web endpoints for webmentions or micropub.

The problem is with how you then actually get hold of any money that is owed to you from micropayments. Coil doesn���t handle this directly. You have to set up a ���wallet��� with a third-party service and therein lies the problem.

They are all terrible.

I���m not talking about the hoops you have to jump through to set up an account. I get it. This is scary financial stuff so of course I���ll need to scan my passport and hand over loads of information (more than is needed to open an actual bank account with, say, Monzo).

No, the problem is the stench of crypto.

I tried Stronghold for a while. They really, really don���t want you to use boring old-fashioned currencies like the euro or the pound. There���s also Gatehub. Same. And there���s Uphold. Also a shell game.

I���ve been using Coil and Uphold for a while now, and I���ve amassed a grand total of ��6.06 ��� woo-hoo! So I log into my account and attempt to transfer that sweet, sweet monetisation and …I can���t.

The amount needs to be greater than or equal to ��11.53 GBP

But I can still exchange that ��6.06 for magic beans like Bitcoin, XRP, and Ether.

The whole thing smells of grift and it feels icky to be in any way associated with it. I understand why Coil needs to partner with existing payment providers, but it would be nice if just one of them weren���t propping up ponzi schemes. If anyone has found a way to get web monetisation to work without needing like you need to take a shower afterwards, I���d love to hear about it.

An email to The Guardian

From: jeremy@adactio.comTo: guardian.readers@theguardian.com

Hello,

My name is Jeremy and I���ve been a paid subscriber to The Guardian for a few years now. But I���m considering cancelling my account after reading this editorial.

On the face of it, the headline of the article sound reasonable and hard to disagree with. But the substance of the article downplays anti-trans views as simply being ���gender critical.��� This is akin to describing segregationist views as ���integration critical.���

This line is particularly egregious:

As a society, we need to resolve the question of how to protect the privacy, dignity and rights of trans women while also respecting the privacy, dignity and rights of those born female.

Setting up these positions as though one in any way invalidates the other gives oxygen to those who wish to paint someone���s identity as a threat. I���m very disappointed to see this viewpoint expressed in an editorial on The Guardian website.

Yours,

Jeremy Keith

Notified

I got a notification on my phone on Monday.

For most people this would be an unremarkable occurence. For me it���s quite unusual. I���ve written before about my relationship with notifications:

If I install an app on my phone, the first thing I do is switch off all notifications. That saves battery life and sanity.

The only time my phone is allowed to ask for my attention is for phone calls, SMS, or FaceTime (all rare occurrences). I initiate every other interaction���Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, the web. My phone is a tool that I control, not the other way around.

In short, I allow notifications from humans but never from machines. I am sometimes horrified when I see other people���s phones lighting up with notifications about email, tweets, or���God help us���news stories. I try not to be judgemental, but honestly, how does anyone live like that?

The next version of iOS will feature focus modes allowing you to toggle when certain notifications are allowed. That���s a welcome addition, but it���s kind of horrifying that it���s even necessary. It���s like announcing a new padded helmet that will help reduce the pain the next time you choose to hit your own head with a hammer. It doesn���t really address the underlying problem.

Anyway, I made an exception to my rule about not allowing notifications from non-humans. Given the exceptional circumstances of The Situation, I have allowed notifications from the NHS COVID-19 app.

And that���s why I got a notification on my phone on Monday.

It said that I had come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 and that I would need to self-isolate until midnight on Friday. I haven���t been out of the house much at all���and never indoors���so I think it must be because I checked into a seafront bar last week for an outdoor drink; the QR code for the venue would���ve encompased both the indoor and outdoor areas.

Even though it wasn���t part of the advice for self-isolation, I got a lateral flow test to see if I was actually infected.

I did the test and I can confidentally say that I would very much like to never repeat that experience.

The test was negative. But I���m still going to stick to the instructions I���ve been given. In fact, that���s probably why testing isn���t part of the recommended advice; I can imagine a lot of people getting a negative test and saying, ���I���m sure I���m fine���I don���t need to self-isolate.���

So I won���t be leaving the house until Saturday. This is not a great inconvenience. It���s not like I had many plans. But…

This is why, for the final day of UX Fest, I will be performing my hosting duties from the comfort of my own home instead of the swankier, more professional environment of the Clearleft studio. I hope I don���t bring the tone down too much.

I also had to turn down an invitation to play some tunes with two fully vaccinated fellow musicians on Friday. It felt a bit strange to explain why. ���I���d love to, but my phone says I have to stay in.���

I feel like I���m in that Bruce Sterling short story Maneki Neko, obedientally taking orders from my pokkecon.

Talking about sci-fi

I gave my sci-fi talk last week at Marc���s Stay Curious event. I really like the format of these evening events: two talks followed by joint discussion, interspersed with music from Tobi. This particular evening was especially enjoyable, with some great discussion points being raised.

Steph and I had already colluded ahead of time on how we were going to split up the talks. She would go narrow and dive into one specific subgenre, solarpunk. I would go broad and give a big picture overview of science fiction literature.

Obviously I couldn���t possibly squeeze the entire subject of sci-fi into one short talk, so all I could really do was give my own personal subjective account. Hence, the talk is called Sci-fi and Me. I���ve published the transcript, uploaded the slides and the audio, and Marc has published the video on YouTube and Vimeo. Kudos to Tina Pham for going above and beyond to deliver a supremely accurate transcript with a super-fast turnaround.

I divided the talk into three sections. The first is my own personal story of growing up in small-town Ireland and reading every sci-fi book I could get my hands on from the local library. The second part was a quick history of sci-fi publishing covering the last two hundred years. The third and final part was a run-down of ten topics that sci-fi deals with. For each topic, I gave a brief explanation, mentioned a few books and then chose one that best represents that particular topic. That was hard.

Planetary romance. I mentioned the John Carter books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss, and the Riverworld saga by Philip Jos�� Farmer. I chose Dune by Frank Herbert.Space opera. I mentioned the Skylark and Lensman books by E.E. ���Doc��� Smith, the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, and the Machineries of Empire books by Yoon Ha Lee. I chose Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.Generation starships. I mentioned Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. I chose Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.Utopia. I mentioned the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I chose The Dispossessed by Ursula Le GuinDystopia. I mentioned The Handmaid���s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I chose 1984 by George Orwell.Post-apocalypse. I mentioned The Drought and The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I chose Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.Artificial intelligence. I mentioned Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I chose I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.First contact. I mentioned The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells, Childhood���s End and Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and Contact by Carl Sagan. I chose Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang.Time travel. I mentioned The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, and The Peripheral by William Gibson. I chose Kindred by Octavia Butler.Alternative history. I mentioned A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! by Harry Harrison. I chose The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick.Cyberpunk. I mentioned Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. I chose Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Okay, that���s eleven, not ten, but that last one is a bit of a cheat���it���s a subgenre rather than a topic. But it allowed me to segue nicely into Steph���s talk.

Here���s a list of those eleven books. I can recommend each and every one of them. Still, the problem with going with this topic-based approach was that some of my favourite sci-fi books of all time fall outside of any kind of classification system. Where would I put The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, one of my all-time favourites? How could I classify Philip K. Dick books like Ubik, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, or A Scanner Darkly? And where would I even begin to describe the books of Christopher Priest?

But despite the inevitable gaps, I���m really pleased with how the overall talk turned out. I had a lot of fun preparing it and even more fun presenting it. It made a nice change from the usual topics I talk about. Incidentally, if you���ve got a conference or a podcast and you ever want me to talk about something other than the web, I���m always happy to blather on about sci-fi.

Here���s the talk. I hope you like it.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons

I remember trying to convince people to use semantic markup because it���s good for accessibility. That tactic didn���t always work. When it didn���t, I would add ���By the way, Google���s searchbot is indistinguishable from a screen-reader user so semantic markup is good for SEO.���

That usually worked. It always felt unsatisfying though. I don���t know why. It doesn���t matter if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. The end result is what matters. But still. It never felt great.

It happened with responsive design and progressive enhancement too. If I couldn���t convince people based on user experience benefits, I���d pull up some official pronouncement from Google recommending those techniques.

Even AMP, a dangerously ill-conceived project, has one very handy ace in the hole. You can���t add third-party JavaScript cruft to AMP pages. That���s useful:

Beleaguered developers working for publishers of big bloated web pages have a hard time arguing with their boss when they���re told to add another crappy JavaScript tracking script or bloated library to their pages. But when they���re making AMP pages, they can easily refuse, pointing out that the AMP rules don���t allow it. Google plays the bad cop for us, and it���s a very valuable role.

AMP is currently dying, which is good news. Google have announced that core web vitals will be used to boost ranking instead of requiring you to publish in their proprietary AMP format. The really good news is that the political advantage that came with AMP has also been ported over to core web vitals.

Take user-hostile obtrusive overlays. Perhaps, as a contientious developer, you���ve been arguing for years that they should be removed from the site you work on because they���re so bad for the user experience. Perhaps you have been met with the same indifference that I used to get regarding semantic markup.

Well, now you can point out how those annoying overlays are affecting, for example, the cumulative layout shift for the site. And that number is directly related to SEO. It���s one thing for a department to over-ride UX concerns, but I bet they���d think twice about jeopardising the site���s ranking with Google.

I know it doesn���t feel great. It���s like dealing with a bully by getting an even bigger bully to threaten them. Still. Needs must.

The spirit of the staircase

The French have a wonderful phrase, lesprit de l���escalier. It describes that feeling when you���ve stormed out of the room after an argument and you���re already halfway down the stairs when you think of the perfect quip that you wish you had said.

I had a similar feeling last week but instead of wishing I had said something, I was wishing I had kept my mouth shut.

I have an annoying tendency to want to get the last word in. I don���t have a problem coming up with a barbed quip. My problem is wishing I could take them back.

This happened while I was hosting the conference portion of UX Fest last week. On the hand, I don���t want the discussions to be dull so I try to come up with thought-provoking points to bring up. But take that too far and it gets ugly. There���s a fine line between asking probing questions and just being mean (I���m reminded of headline in The Onion, ���Devil���s Advocate Turns Out To Be Just An Asshole���).

Towards the end of the conference, there was a really good robust discussion underway. But I couldn���t resist getting in the last word. In the attempt to make myself look clever I ended up saying something hurtful and clumsy.

Fucking idiot.

I apologised, and it all worked out well in the end, but damn if I haven���t spent the last week on the staircase wishing I could turn back time and say …nothing.

Deceptive dark patterns

When I was braindumping my thoughts prompted by last week���s UX Fest conference, I wrote about dark patterns.

Well, actually I wrote about deceptive dark patterns. That was a deliberate choice.

The phrase ���dark pattern��� is …problematic. We really don���t need to be associating darkness with negativity any more than we already do in our language and culture.

This is something I discussed with Melissa Smith after her talk on this topic. The consensus in general seems to be that the terminology is far from ideal, but it���s a bit late to change it now (I���m sure if Harry were coining the term today, he would choose a different phrase).

The defining characteristic of a ���dark��� pattern is that intentionally deceptive. How about we shift the terminology to talk about deceptive patterns?

Now, I get that inertia is a powerful force and it would be confusing to try do to a find-and-replace on all the resources that already exist on documenting ���dark��� patterns. So here���s a compromise:

From here on out, let���s start using the adjective ���deceptive��� in addition to the existing adjective ���dark.��� That���s what I did in my blog post. I only used the phrase ���deceptive dark patterns.���

If we do that consistently, then after a while we���ll be able to drop one of those adjectives������dark������and refer to ���deceptive patterns.���

Personally I���d love it if we could change the terminology overnight���and I���m quite heartened by the speed at which we changed our Github branches from ���master��� to ���main������but being pragmatic, I think this approach stands a greater chance of success.

Who���s with me?

Weighing up UX

You can listen to an audio version of Weighing up UX.

This is the month of UX Fest 2021���this year���s online version of UX London. The festival continues with masterclasses every Tuesday in June and a festival day of talks every Thursday (tickets for both are still available). But it all kicked off with the conference part last week: three back-to-back days of talks.

I have the great pleasure of hosting the event so not only do I get to see a whole lot of great talks, I also get to quiz the speakers afterwards.

Right from day one, a theme emerged that continued throughout the conference and I suspect will continue for the rest of the festival too. That topic was metrics. Kind of.

See, metrics come up when we���re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn clich��). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design���s benefit to the business, they���re not really cut out for measuring user experience.

People have tried to quantify user experience benefits using measurements like NetPromoter Score, which is about as useful as reading tea leaves or chicken entrails.

So we tend to equate user experience gains with business gains. That makes sense. Happy users should be good for business. That���s a reasonable hypothesis. But it gets tricky when you need to make the case for improving the user experience if you can���t tie it directly to some business metric. That���s when we run into the McNamara fallacy:

Making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others.

The way out of this quantitative blind spot is to use qualitative research. But another theme of UX Fest was just how woefully under-represented researchers are in most organisations. And even when you���ve gone and talked to users and you���ve got their stories, you still need to play that back in a way that makes sense to the business folks. These are stories. They don���t lend themselves to being converted into charts���n���graphs.

And so we tend to fall back on more traditional metrics, based on that assumption that what���s good for user experience is good for business. But it���s a short step from making that equivalency to flipping the equation: what���s good for the business must, by definition, be good user experience. That���s where things get dicey.

Broadly speaking, the talks at UX Fest could be put into two categories. You���ve got talks covering practical subjects like product design, content design, research, growth design, and so on. Then you���ve got the higher-level, almost philosophical talks looking at the big picture and questioning the industry���s direction of travel.

The tension between these two categories was the highlight of the conference for me. It worked particularly well when there were back-to-back talks (and joint Q&A) featuring a hands-on case study that successfully pushed the needle on business metrics followed by a more cautionary talk asking whether our priorities are out of whack.

For example, there was a case study on growth design, which emphasised the importance of A/B testing for validation, immediately followed by a talk on deceptive dark patterns. Now, I suspect that if you were to A/B test a deceptive dark pattern, the test would validate its use (at least in the short term). It���s no coincidence that a company like Booking.com, which lives by the A/B sword, is also one of the companies sued for using distressing design patterns.

Using A/B tests alone is like using a loaded weapon without supervision. They only tell you what people do. And again, the solution is to make sure you���re also doing qualitative research���that���s how you find out why people are doing what they do.

But as I���ve pondered the lessons from last week���s conference, I���ve come to realise that there���s also a danger of focusing purely on the user experience. Hear me out���

At one point, the question came up as to whether deceptive dark patterns were ever justified. What if it���s for a good cause? What if the deceptive dark pattern is being used by an organisation actively campaigning to do good in the world?

In my mind, there was no question. A deceptive dark pattern is wrong, no matter who���s doing it.

(There���s also the problem of organisations that think they���re doing good in the world: I���m sure that every talented engineer that worked on Google AMP honestly believed they were acting in the best interests of the open web even as they worked to destroy it.)

Where it gets interesting is when you flip the question around.

Suppose you���re a designer working at an organisation that is decidedly not a force for good in the world. Say you���re working at Facebook, a company that prioritises data-gathering and engagement so much that they���ll tolerate insurrectionists and even genocidal movements. Now let���s say there���s talk in your department of implementing a deceptive dark pattern that will drive user engagement. But you, being a good designer who fights for the user, take a stand against this and you successfully find a way to ensure that Facebook doesn���t deploy that deceptive dark pattern.

Yay?

Does that count as being a good user experience designer? Yes, you���ve done good work at the coalface. But the overall business goal is like a deceptive dark pattern that���s so big you can���t take it in. Is it even possible to do ���good��� design when you���re inside the belly of that beast?

Facebook is a relatively straightforward case. Anyone who���s still working at Facebook can���t claim ignorance. They know full well where that company���s priorities lie. No doubt they sleep at night by convincing themselves they can accomplish more from the inside than without. But what about companies that exist in the grey area of being imperfect? Frankly, what about any company that relies on surveillance capitalism for its success? Is it still possible to do ���good��� design there?

There are no easy answers and that���s why it so often comes down to individual choice. I know many designers who wouldn���t work at certain companies ���but they also wouldn���t judge anyone else who chooses to work at those companies.

At Clearleft, every staff member has two levels of veto on client work. You can say ���I���m not comfortable working on this���, in which case, the work may still happen but we���ll make sure the resourcing works out so you don���t have anything to do with that project. Or you can say ���I���m not comfortable with Clearleft working on this���, in which case the work won���t go ahead (this usually happens before we even get to the pitching stage although there have been one or two examples over the years where we���ve pulled out of the running for certain projects).

Going back to the question of whether it���s ever okay to use a deceptive dark pattern, here���s what I think���

It makes no difference whether it���s implemented by ProPublica or Breitbart; using a deceptive dark pattern is wrong.

But there is a world of difference in being a designer who works at ProPublica and being a designer who works at Breitbart.

That���s what I���m getting at when I say there���s a danger to focusing purely on user experience. That focus can be used as a way of avoiding responsibility for the larger business goals. Then designers are like the soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V:

For we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

Two decades of thesession.org

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I���d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That���s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That���s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What���s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I���m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I���m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I���ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There���s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it���s working out very nicely.

What���s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I���m travelling somewhere and there���s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I���ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it���s not a weight of responsibility���the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I���ve ever done. It���s older than any books I���ve written. It���s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it���s even older than this blog (just).

I���m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That���s quite a chunk of my life. I think it���s fair to say that it���s part of me now. Of all the things I���ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I���m proudest of.

I���m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

Broad Band

I like to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is often of the science variety. Actually, so is the non-fiction.

There was a non-fiction book I had queued up for a while and I finally got around to reading. Broad Band by Claire L. Evans. Now I���m kicking myself that I didn���t read it earlier. I think I might���ve been remembering how I found Mar Hicks���s Programmed Inequality to be a bit of a slog���a fascinating topic, but written in a fairly academic style. Broad Band covers some similar ground, but wow, is the writing style in a class of its own!

This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling���a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting���even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.

It���s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.

I absolutely loved it. So did Cory Doctorow:

Because she is a brilliant and lyrical writer she brings these women to life, turns them into fully formed characters, makes you see and feel their life stories, frustrations and triumphs.

Even the most celebrated women of tech history ��� Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper ��� leap off the page as people, not merely historical personages or pioneers. Again, these are stories I thought I knew, and realized I didn’t.

Yes! That!

Read it for yourself and see what you think.