Welcome back to the Bookmark Beat 🥁. I hope everyone enjoyed that weird week or two where half the world was on one version of Daylight Saving Time and the other half hadn’t switched yet. Then there’s Arizona… but we won’t get into that here!

Speaking of standardization (or the lack thereof in timezones), I found some time in this little newsletter of mine to share my thoughts about when aligning a design to a standard pattern can be useful and when we should feel comfortable straying from them.

But first, I’ll share my regular selection of things on the web that caught my attention. From trash parks and a million checkboxes to treatises on the potential upsides of AI development, I think everyone who reads this can find at least one thing in here that they’ll find interesting.

“A” Section: This Month’s Bookmarks

Moerenuma Park: A Giant, Gorgeous ‘Living Sculpture’ in Hokkaido by Kim Kahan

Mount Moere is made of garbage — non-burnable garbage and construction waste soil, to be exact — and stands 62 meters tall. The park itself is built on the site of a former trash disposal plant. Endeavoring to turn the negative symbol of urbanization into something beautiful, Noguchi and Sapporo city officials worked together to create a hill upon which people could play.

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes by Nolen Royalty (eieio)

Teens wrote me a secret. I found them…

So what’d they do? Well, they drew a whole lot! As they built better systems for drawing (and better reverse-engineered my rate limits) their drawings became more complex.

Over time they experimented with animations and even tried out some protocols for adding color - like treating adjacent cells as the red, green, and blue channels of a color and drawing to a smaller grid.

Nudging User Decisions: Applying Foundational Theory from Behavioral Economics to UX and Service Design by Janine Rosado

As a person moves through their physical and/or digital environments each day they are confronted with an array of different choices and cues to help guide their decision-making… Choice architecture has six tenants that influence and can nudge choices. Those six tenants are defaults, feedback, incentives, mapping, structuring, and predictable error.

Gmail: Designed to be joyfully simple by Elizabeth Laraki

Kevin was strategic about how he introduced the idea of rounded corners. In leadership reviews, an entire design could be tossed because of a small design decision an exec didn’t like. So he made a mid-fidelity mockup with corner radii that could be easily adjusted to four or five different amounts of roundedness.

This changed the discussion from “should we do rounded corners?” to “how rounded of a corner do we want?”

It’s hard to write code for computers, but it’s even harder to write code for humans by Erik Bernhardsson

Somewhat related to the previous point, let’s say in your framework you introduce a thing that takes some values and evalutes to a new values. What do you call it? A compute node? A valuator? A frobniscator?

No! You call it a function! If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

Are you considering the developer’s mental model? by Maria Kovalevich

Simply put, a user’s mental model is their internal understanding of how a product or system should work, based on their previous experiences, knowledge, and expectations. It helps users predict the outcomes of their actions when interacting with a product. If the interface aligns with this mental model, it will be intuitive and easy to use. (archive.is link)

A quick primer on designing with AI by Erin ‘Folletto’ Casali

While I haven’t done ‘building’ work in the current wave of LLMs, I still try to be as up-to-date as I can on the field, reading sometimes complex papers or their explanation written by many good people, with a product and design angle. This is because I believe that to design it’s important to know the material we work with. And LLMs are a new material.

Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic)

[P]eople sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

No one’s ready for this by Sarah Jeong

Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

Not articles: but cool things from the internet

• True Media attempts to identify political deepfakes in social media using AI. It’s an interesting media literacy tool that I hope is adopted by at least news organizations (if not the general public at large)
• Make It Yourself is a PDF collection of 1000 useful things - including links to the relevant specs, 3D printer files and guides to make them yourself
• cobalt is a link/media downloader that I now have on speed-dial for when my friends send me TikToks, Instagram posts or Facebook videos. I can now view all the semi-walled-gardened memes without having to make accounts on every platform 🙌🏼
• Why Design is Hard is a new book by Scott Berkun and Bryan Zug. If you’re new to design or are feeling isolated as a designer, I’d recommend you check it out
• Bop Spotter is a solar powered Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, listening for music high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco
• Shape of AI is a collection of UX patterns that people are using in AI interfaces

That’s it for this month’s links! If that’s not enough for you (or if you just want an endless stream of every song and podcast I’m listening to), check out the “I am” page on my website! I just updated it to use the latest version of Svelte and SvelteKit so it should be snappier than ever.

If you’d rather just receive updates whenever I write this newsletter, you can do that by subscribing on Substack 📬

“B” Section: Designing off the beaten path

I hiked a lot growing up. I still do! And one thing that’s continued to stick with me from when I was first learning to walk the trails was to stay on those trails. Leave No Trace meant more than just packing out your trash and leaving things better than you found them; it also meant not carving your own path–possibly destroying plants and micro-organisms in the process.

Yet, when I’ve hiked the same trail over and over again. There’s always a tempting feeling to try something new: “What if there’s a great view over there?” or “Wouldn’t this switchback be easier if this part looped around a little farther?” or even “I have the equipment, I could just go straight up here.”

There’s something about a well-worn path that can make creative people uncomfortable. As designers, we like to ask “why?” instead of taking things for granted. We tend to ask ourselves questions like, “Why do navigation controls have to be at the top of the screen?” and “Wouldn’t it be easier if they were closer to where our thumbs are?”

Many product teams have even encouraged this line of thinking by saying they start with first principles and are believe that they better off by doing so. But I would strongly caution against this. Instead, I believe that actual usage should guide deviations from the standard. Most trails (and even highways) that we use today, after all, are based off of indigenous trails that followed large animals through the forests and plains.

There’s a common meme shared among UX and civic planners alike that shows “user experience” vs. “design” where a person is walking along a dirt path that cuts the corner of a nicely paved path. Despite its inaccurate labeling (I don’t think the dirt path fully encompasses the definition of “user experience”), there’s a clear warning embedded in the image:

No matter what you think the user will do, it’s possible that they’ll do something completely different

So what would happen if, instead of starting with the initial expense of paving paths that students might not use, we paved the routes after students had already shown where they would go? Well, the folks at Ohio State University did just that:

This approach pushes back on the idea that is the designer’s role to think with “first principles” and “redesign from the ground up.” Instead, it encourages us to look at what people are doing right now and make it easier to do those things. For instance, now wheelchair users can get from one building to another on the OSU campus without having to go around the entire Oval.

In the face of uncertainty, when I have no idea how a user will accomplish their task, I do research to find out which existing pattern can help them (see Janine Rosado’s article above). As they use our tool, I’ll continue to iterate: adjusting that pattern into something that’s more specific to the domain. Eventually, the components, layout and language may look nothing like what you’ll find in About Face but they will be based on a combination of an entire user base’s preferences–instead of the curious musings of a two-pizza team in the valley.

While I think it’s important to ask “why” to identify places where technology can improve, I also must acknowledge that designers will not have all the answers. The best way to invent new solutions is not though the improvement in technology; nor is it the reliance on a set of standards that users are familiar with. Instead, the best solutions come from our ability to adjust the underlying technology and patterns to conform with what users’ need at a given point in time.

Coda: Books I’m reading

Here’s the books I’ve read (or am still reading) this month:

• How to Hide and Empire by Daniel Immerwahr is the second book on imperialism that I’ve read this month (the previous one being Empireland). It’s a well-researched and easy-to-follow history of how the US became a dominant force in the Pacific and the after effects of its colonial desires at the end of the 19th century.
• Roadside Picnic by the Strugtaskys was recommended to me by my partner after we watched the movie Stalker together. I recently described it to a friend as a “depressing walk through existential dread,” yet I still find myself wanting to hang out with those characters for a just a little longer…
• Something Crawled Out is an ongoing comic book series by Son M. and Cas (aka ‘MadCursed’) that my local comic book dealer pulled for me. It’s pretty dark and perfect for spooky season. I can’t wait to find out who the real “devil” is in the end!
• I finally finished War and Peace thanks to the magic of the auto-serializing email service known as Modern Serial. I seriously couldn’t have finished this book without it so thanks to Andrew Edstrom for making such an invaluable service.

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And that’s all for this EP 💽! If you’d like some more thoughts before the next newsletter, feel free to ping me in the comments on Substack (or just send me an email).

Catch ya next beat 🥁😎🥁