Russell Davies has completely rearranged the furniture of my brain with his explanation of Fredkin’s Paradox and how to stop wheelspinning on a decision.
“If it's very difficult to decide, it's probably because the alternatives are equivalent and therefore it doesn't matter which one you choose. Although it feels incredibly important that you decide one or the other, really what's important is just getting on and making the decision [...] It's kind of liberating when you realise and you can articulate, hey, we're stuck in Fredkin's paradox. It doesn't matter which of these we decide, we should just get on with something.”
So, ummmm… It’s Russell Davies again. But this furniture rearranging 1-2 was too good not to share. He reckons *whisper it* that you should stop bothering your team with ideas.
“Senior leaders have a lot of ideas. They occur to us in meetings, or when we're reading the board papers or are inspired by something we saw on TikTok this morning. They're not normally very good. They're not grounded in lived operational experience or regular contact with customers. They're not based in deep awareness of the trade-offs and frictions surrounding the ideas you're currently executing.”
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect is the human tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. As long as the design looks pretty, we’re more tolerant of minor UX issues.
But it’s a lemon-and-sugar, bittersweet quirk of the brain, because it also gets in the way of sniffing out problems during testing. Kate Moran of NNG has explained how to counteract it.
“Use vague questions like: “Do you have any comments about how easy or difficult it was to find this information?” “What made this easy or difficult to read?” “What would you change about this app, if anything?” You might also return the user to a page that seemed particularly challenging and ask them to describe what happened.”
Douglas Adams reckoned that we stop getting excited by new technology around age 35 and start being cynical instead. Tom Johnson, Lord of the Chart, has been finding out whether that holds true.
“Every generation – except one – has seen their level of agreement [that new tech has a positive impact] decline over the years [...] Gen Z responses to this question are very similar to those of older groups, and like older groups, they are getting more negative lately [...] Conversely, Millennials are moving in the opposite direction [...] and have been getting more positive about new tech since 2022. So far this year, 71% of Millennials agree that new tech has a positive impact on society – at least 15% higher than any other group.”
I spend probably too much time thinking about how, if an alien landed on Earth, so many of our behaviours would seem gigantically weird. So I found Praveen’s piece on the strangeness of queues deeply validating. I’d like to formally request a follow up on clapping next.
One for the cartophiles out there… An elevation map of the world, made extra interesting by the colour scale adjusting to the area you’re looking at. Amazingly, Greenland really is that high above sea level.
Now that I’ve talked myself down from throwing my laptop out of the window, I’m ready to pass on this maddening little challenge on drawing the perfect circle. I’d recommend warming up by watching Alexander Overwijk do his thing (h/t Kottke).
Bon weekend,
Fran