Nothing accelerates burnout faster than bad management. Think you’re passionate about the craft of design? See how long that lasts in a toxic design culture.
These are obviously very difficult things to scale though. A small startup has a much easier time of maintaining a culture of trust and respect for the process than a large multi-org corporation.
Even some basic filtering of the Favorites in Apple Maps would make a world of difference for searching
Notification toxicity is always a clear sign of non-designers trying to eke out some congratulatory metrics at the cost of brand perception and user experience.
The example that always comes to mind are DoorDash notifications. You would want to leave them on for what you can consider useful information (order status, delivery driver messages), but by doing so you get uninvited marketing spam piped directly to you.
Over-meeting days are pretty much shit for design productivity. What makes it particularly frustrating is that there isn’t automatically additional time given to complete the actual designs. This is why designers often end up having to resort to the simplest solution: they simply haven’t had enough time to properly process the problem and try an adequate number of solutions.
This is exactly what I think of when people advocate for third-party App Stores on iOS. Instead of one consistent, straightforward purchasing experience, we get these shells that always require some additional bullshit to use.
The immediacy of DoorDash + Apple Maps results.
Some fun details:
Enshittification
(verb)
- To enshittify.
- The process by which a social media platform’s content and engagement is overwhelmed by its toxicity (either internally or externally focused).
- How a platform dies.
Is it even worth mentioning anything else when the Apple Vision Pro was announced today?
It really seems Apple did their homework on this one, especially as I read the more informed opinions online.
And as a designer, it’s super fun to have a new method by which you can solve problems!
So Microsoft released Fluent 2…
I’ll defer to this comment on Hacker News that sums it up nicely:
It’s too bad that Microsoft as an organization doesn’t care about good design. I don’t look at Satya Nadella and think of a man who has taste. And Microsoft doesn’t have a Chief Design Officer, as far as I know.
Instead, Microsoft has VPs. So there’s no one person at the helm saying, “This is the vision and where we’re heading.”
As a result, I suspect there are actual good designers at Microsoft trying to start movements from within, and those have bubbled up to what we see today as the progression of Microsoft’s design through Fluent from Metro and prior.
But because there’s no one at the helm, these efforts will always be isolated.
There will never be anyone saying, “Let’s carry these efforts across products and down to the UI.” “Let’s deprecate and discontinue all of these fragmented UI frameworks. Moving forward, Microsoft will only create UI using Fluent UI.”
Worse yet, even if someone tried, Microsoft has tried and failed again and again and again so why would you bother? It’s clear Microsoft’s UIs are shifting sand compared to Apple’s platforms or even Linux desktops!