What We’re Reading

Andrew Betts describes a recent browsing session:

I tapped a link in the Twitter app, which showed as google.co.uk/amp/s/www.rt.c…, got a page in Twitter’s in-app webview, where the visible URL bar displays the reassuring google.co.uk. But this is actually content from Russia Today, an organisation 100% funded by the Russian government and classified as propaganda by Columbia Journalism Review and by the former US Secretary of State. Google are allowing RT to get away with zero branding, and are happily distributing the content to a mass audience.

This is not OK. This is catastrophic.

Betts is talking about content cached by Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) platform. While the goal of the platform is ostensibly to speed delivery of pages, it also serves those pages from a Google URL. With the URL spoofed, the origin of the content is hard to discern. This “recklessly devalues the URL,” Betts writes, and makes AMP an attractive petri dish for fake news:

If the world’s biggest content discovery and delivery platforms prioritise security, performance and popularity, over authenticity, evidence and independence, well, the likely result is an exponential rise of simplistic, populistic thinking, inevitably spreading and amplifying until false beliefs become tacitly accepted as facts. … [W]e need a much stronger focus on authenticity as a strong ranking signal. This is not only critical to avoid potentially huge societal implications of bad decision making, but also cultivates better content by improving incentives for creators.

Totally agree. As our answer machines continue to be overwhelmed by propaganda (and worse), they need to listen for new ranking signals. We need to build systems smart enough to know when they’re not smart enough—and that know to complain when their immune systems have been compromised.

Technology decisions in AMP are affecting far more than page speeds, aggravating what I consider to be one of the big civic crises of our times: the erosion of trust in the fourth estate. At the very least, let’s protect the URL as citation and origin model.

Another day, another hacked dishwasher. Miele’s internet-connected dishwasher is vulnerable to an attack that could allow hackers to take control of the network and make a mess well beyond the kitchen. While the security problem is bad enough, Hackaday points out there’s no good way to address it:

The problem is, a dishwasher is not a computer. Unlike Microsoft, or Google, or even the people behind VLC, Miele don’t have infrastructure in place to push out an update to dishwashers worldwide. This means that as it stands, your only real solutions are to either disconnect the dishwasher from your network, or lock it behind a highly restrictive firewall. Both are likely to impede functionality.

While poor security is already becoming a hallmark of internet-of-things gadgets, the lack of a plan for fixing inevitable problems is even more concerning. It suggests a vacuum of care not only for customer experience but for sustainability of the product. Sending your dishwasher to the landfill for a software bug shouldn’t be part of the product lifecycle.

First, Andy Clarke said web style guides should be more stylish. Then Jeremy Keith said beauty is in the eye of the beholder; the design and style should suit the audience.

Now Brad Frost adds to the exchange by suggesting that there may be more than one audience for a design system’s style guide. If establishing consensus is a key goal of a design system (and it should be), then its style guide should welcome a big, broad group:

A style guide has the opportunity to serve as a watering hole for the entire organization, helping establish a common vocabulary for every discipline invested in the success of the company’s digital products. Establishing this common vocabulary can lead to more efficient work, better communication, and more collaboration between disciplines across the organization. That’s why the style guide should be an inviting place for everybody, not just [core] design system users.

Amen. As the front door to the design system, this reference site should be at once approachable, practical, and yeah, even a little inspiring for the whole organization. That can happen over time; get it out there, refine it, and help your organization to shape it to its disparate needs.

That’s a pretty good triangulation among the three points of views here. The one thing I’d also add: style guides are ideally built out of their own components, guidelines, and design principles. They should be not only a container for the design system, but a living demonstration of it. It should be exactly as stylish as the underlying system.