Product Feeling
Recently I read the post Look and Feel and Feel by Jason Fried, where he talked about how product makes you feel, not just the look, not the single design but the product as a whole, delivers what kind of emotion to you.
It was a interesting read. He compared Twitter and Instagram, former generates negative emotion like anxious, unhappy, uncomfortable because people on Twitter tend to post shitty experience, while for Instagram it’s harder to be negative when sharing a picture.
It was an inspiring read, since then I kept thinking about some tools and services I’ve been using, or used to use on a daily basis.
Slack
I would rate it 5 stars. It shocked me in the beginning with the clean, modern design compare to Hipchat. The way of setting profiles and avatar are by answering questions from Slackbot. It gave me a warm feeling instead of a boring form.
Then it keeps improving itself in the UX perspective. You try to login Slack on your phone, there’s a thoughtful “1password” link that saves you from switching/copying/pasting mess. Or you could ask for a “magic link” that sends to your inbox, by clicking the link inside the mail you’re magically logged in without typing the password.
Getting double, triple notifications from all your devices? Slack also takes care of that, it disables email notification once you enable push notifications on your phone.
The overall feeling of Slack is super comfortable. It makes me feel like they understand all your little frustrations, and is doing pretty good job on providing the solutions transparently.
Day One
I don’t have a habit of keeping a journal everyday, but when I strongly feel I would like to write something down about that day, I always go to Day One.
It’s private, it’s personal, it’s about me. Passcode helps me protect it, weather and location provide the assistive information of that day, simple design provides quick access to all the things(95% is “New Entry”), I need.
It doesn’t have some killer features in my opinion, it’s kinda common nowadays to have your apps available on all devices. But it makes me feel it’s the app to write a digital journal without any unnecessary noises.
Jason said it’s harder to be negative when sharing a picture, so true. Long time ago I noticed the photos I posted to Instagram usually became the highlights of that period. Those are all delightful moments for me, the community and contents are already there, even though I don’t have photos to post I still like to browse my timeline to see what are the joys from my friends.
It really depends, depends on whether or not you cultivated your following list.
Facebook reflects all the social pressure like if your colleague requests to be your friend, it’s hard to say no. But on Twitter it’s free(at least for me). I could follow and unfollow anyone based on if their tweets fit my needs.
I remember when I first joined the company, I got lots of new Twitter followers from my colleagues. I felt warm and almost immediately followed back without thinking, then OMG it turned out to be a total disaster. My timeline got robbed, so many meaningless chitchats were literally polluting my eyes.
After that lesson I’ve been very careful on who to follow. And so far it does pretty what I want from it: I could get inspiring contents to feed my brain whenever I open it, but also they are discardable I have no pressure on shutting it down completely.
I remember I was checking Facebook lots of times a day 2 or 3 years ago, when focusing in the browser address bar it was so hard to resist the temptation of hitting the “f” key to open Facebook. But the usage of Facebook has changed dramatically for me.
Now I don’t want to post anything on it, and also don’t want to check it unless it’s necessary(Facebook Message). What Facebook makes me feel is it owns me, I may have control over several things but who knows tomorrow if they’re gonna change it. Maybe it’s the impression I’ve got through the years how Facebook expose without your permission first then give you the control back later.
Like the birthday notification, I know lots of my friends, including me are hiding our birthdays before the day to prevent it from sending the sidebar notifications to all your friends. You either choose hide the info completely or let it be pushed to others’ timeline.
Then the profile photo, how to change it without sending the notification? You could remove the change from your timeline immediately but that won’t stop it spreading through the timeline.
As a user, why I have to try this hard to figure out how to prevent these shitty things?!
Last like I said above, I feel social pressure on Facebook. It feels like I’m dressing suits, holding mic to send my words to the public. In reality I prefer to talk 1 on 1 or in small groups, maybe Facebook is not designed to provide that kind of feeling.
How to design the “feeling”?
As a developer I tend to use the word “can” when talking about features. “Now user can comment”, “they can drag and drop photos!”, but why they want to do that in the first place, what makes them use your feature?
The topic itself could be another post someday in the future, I’ll end this one quoting these questions:
The Twitter vs. Instagram experience is really reinforcing what matters when designing a product. What kind of behavior can we encourage? What kind of moments can we create for people? What do people anticipate before they use something? How does it leave them feeling when they’re done? These are now some of the most important questions for me when working on a design.
