What We’re Reading

From the support FAQ of the eero wifi router:

If you’d like to turn off the LED light on your eero, you can do so either through the eero application or through the Amazon Alexa skillset.

I love this so much. As more and more of our physical objects light up with digital smarts, they’re lighting up literally, too—and often somewhat gratuitously. Every new gadget seems to impose bright, flashing lights on our living rooms, bedrooms, and offices.

Kudos to eero for offering a software setting to give users back control of their physical environment. Looking forward to the moment when “Alexa, ask eero to turn off the LED” evolves into “Alexa, ask the house to turn off all LEDs.”

Ben Sisario of the New York Times on the sudden popularity of bots in the music industry:

50 Cent, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg and Kiss have all deputized chatbots as their automatic, ever-alert greeters on Facebook Messenger, handling the flood of inquiries that would overwhelm any human.

Three things stuck out to me as interesting signals here:

• Chat is emerging as a distribution channel. Bands are using chat to share pre-release clips of singles. (“Based on the data we’re seeing, it’s not crazy to think that a year from now it’s going to be [the music industry’s] No. 1 distribution channel,” according to Matt Schlicht, CEO of chatbot-builder Octane AI.)
• Bots are moving beyond transactions and broadcast/marketing to start to manage common fan communications. (“Chris Mortimer, the head of digital marketing at Interscope, said Messenger was now a critical way for his artists to reach their fans. ‘Right now, a Facebook Messenger inbox is what an email inbox was before the spammers got to it,’ he said.”)
• Bots may have even more promise as proxies for people than for brands/services. The emotional connection some fans feel with these bots is remarkable.

That last point reminds me of Rafał Cymerys’s experiments with automating his friends on Slack: “Behind most automated messages there’s a real person. Why not make it clear from the start? This will give the recipient a reference to a real person.” This approach may have legs beyond entertainment stars.

Cultivating this hero-by-proxy approach in bots relies on voice and tone that is true to the person (and personality) you’re “automating.” Which brings me to my favorite line of the Times piece:

Not all celebrity bots are quite up to the level of verbal verisimilitude, however. Aerosmith’s, for example, responds to virtually every inquiry with “Rock on.”

Exactly 40 years ago, Christopher Alexander’s book A Pattern Language kicked off the whole idea of design patterns. Erin Malone steps back to show how just how far we’ve come. Her timeline traces the path to modern design systems and style guides. (Fun to see my pal and collaborator Brad Frost given such a prominent place in the recent history of all this.)

It’s important to not forget about the explorations and experiments and hard work that many people did (in their companies and on their own time) to share their knowledge and to advance the conversations and the practice of user experience design. Without this work, no one today would be so easily accepting of the need for a robust style guide that contains interactions and code. Today we wonder how you could work (particularly in the enterprise with hundreds of scattered designers) without one.

Aaron Paul Calvin investigates the emotional connections people are making with Alexa:

In many ways, Alexa is the progeny of ELIZA. The way it interacts with people is much more sophisticated than the teleprinter-fed program that communicated through a disassembling and reassembling of its users’ words, but the overall intended effect is still the same. Both programs are meant to interact with users in a way that’s supposed to elicit feelings of comfort and intimacy within the user.

It strikes me that purposeful efforts to create a genuine emotional connection can backfire when they’re even a few degrees off. At the home of family friends, otheirr Echo has a 80–90% success rate understanding their daughter. But it never understands her mother. An emotional connection has been made, for sure: Alexa annoys the hell out of her.

A voice UI that doesn’t understand your voice is frustrating. An affection UI that inspires anger is doubly so.

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.