Changes, Choices, and Chickens
Who made that decision? Just how big is Reacher?
My iPhone has updated. My iPad has updated. Windows has updated. My MacBook has updated. Chrome has updated. Facebook has pushed a new update. Instagram has a new version. The Council have emailed me to say they have a new Council Tax website. The website I bought my radiators from tells me I have to create a new account. Exciting news, a rug company I used seven years ago tells me, we have a new website. Exciting for whom?
On my iPhone, the list of apps “updated recently” scrolls and scrolls. Many of them I haven’t opened since they last updated. Whole versions go past between me opening the apps. Ebay, AirBNB, Trainline. 21 apps updated themselves today alone.
I’m sure many of these updates are good. Routine patches and security updates. Performance improvements and bug fixes. I welcome those with open arms.
But then there are the changes.
What was square now is round. The button to log out is now under Account rather than Settings. What was round now is square. New iconography. New colours. New fonts. What was round now is slightly less round. Behold, our squircles! Functionally, the app is the same, but everything is in a different place. We’ve had a change around. The app has been redecorated. It’s been rewritten from the ground up.
How much, I wonder, of the constant flood of software updates that flies into my computers, is changes. Tweaks and shifts that don’t affect the functioning of the apps, but do the same things in slightly different ways. A digital shuffling of the deckchairs.
I think of the hours of work that goes into this shuffling. The meetings, the business cases, the design work, the UX reviews, the Product Managers, the Engineers, the testers, the senior executive sign off sessions, the accessibility reviews and security penetration tests. All of this to make the round buttons square and the square buttons round. To switch one framework for another. To move from serverless to Linux or MySQL to PostgreSQL. So much work to do the same thing in a slightly different way.
There is a rumour that Apple will be redesigning the look of iOS in the next major iPhone release. This is what we’ve “been waiting for every year,” the YouTube channel FPT says, with nearly breathless excitement. Reflecting that it might not be a full redesign, he adds stoically:
A small redesign for Apple apps is better than no redesign at all. But maybe this is just the start of a full redesign. We’re saying this so we don’t crush all your hopes and dreams.
It’s a throwaway remark, but I’ve been pondering it, on and off, since I heard it.
A small redesign is better than no redesign at all? So we don’t crush all your hopes and dreams?
Why would a small redesign be better than no redesign? Who is hoping and dreaming of a change in icon shape?
Redesigns aren’t inherently beneficial. They’re only good if the old design doesn’t fulfil its function. I worry what it means for society to always believe the latest thing is the best thing. When we crave the latest thing, we’ve always on the cusp of dissatisfaction. The latest update is new only for an instant.
I’ve seen more than one company refer to their product redesign as a “make-over”, as if they’re changing their clothes or their hairstyle. In the breathless enthusiasm, I can’t help thinking it feels like being invited to the party of someone you don’t know very well. Whose benefit is this redesign for? Mine, as the user, or the Product and Engineering Managers, already adding “released major update” to their CVs.
This is at the heart of how we think about technology. Do we see it fashion or function? I wouldn’t mind giving my living room a new lick of paint, but I wouldn’t want the buttons on my toaster to be in different places one day. Perhaps whether we are excited about a redesign of iOS depends on whether we treat our phones like our rooms or our toasters.
Rewrites and updates are not a painless process. The update to Sonos’s app went so badly, they would have thrown it away and gone back to the old version if they could. So this all makes me wonder: by constantly tweaking and changing things, have we forgotten what we’re even trying to do? Are we so used to the newest thing being the most exciting, that we no longer remember the standard we are aiming for is consistency and reliability? Is that even possible in a world where we’ve trained users to expect everything to be different every time we use it?
On my bookshelf, I have a set of Increment, a magazine about software engineering published by the payment processing company Stripe. During its 19 issue run, it went through 4 redesigns changes. It sits there, next to my Penguin paperbacks and copies of the New Yorker, unchanged over hundreds of copies. When I look at it, I can’t help thinking that the inconsistent pattern on the spines seems to stand as a representation of the whole world of software product management.
Elsewhere
Undecided by David Sedaris in the New Yorker (5 minutes)
A section from this article, that runs through my head every election season:
Just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters […] I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. […]
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
Sedaris is the master of this sort of long-form comic writing. You have to admire the delivery of that punch line. It’s a joke that is almost entirely formed from its construction.
But also, I think to myself: 2008. That’s when this was from. Nearly two decades ago. A time that, in comparison with some of our politicians, seems almost innocent. We look back on George Bush almost fondly. And actually, that’s another strength to this piece. It’s written in such a way that anyone across the political spectrum can believe it is about voting the other day.
Something Sedaris always does well is poke fun at himself. And I can’t help wondering whether part of the joke is about how sure we are of our position in the face of these “undecided” voters. But also, even while thinking that, I also think: but it’s different now, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The first line of this piece, I notice, is, “I don’t know that it was always this way.” Perhaps it always was?
Accountability Sinks by Mandy Brown in A Working Library (3 minutes)
Organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet[…] Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be […] There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever. […] Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place.
Is this, I wonder, at the heart of so much angst in the modern world?
That’s assuming, of course, that a person did make a decision at all. Another mechanism of accountability sinks is the way in which decisions themselves cascade and lose any sense of their origins. Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up.
I am struck by how often in companies I see everyone slavishly committed to following a course of action that no one agrees with, without even knowing why it is done that way. “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” they say, “it must be done that way.” But often, when you trace it all the way back to the origin, the original reasoning was a spur of the moment decision, or not even a decision at all. Just something that started happening, without anyone deciding or directing it.
I Don't Think You Understand How Big Jack Reacher Actually Is by Chris McPherson in Collider (6 minutes)
I wrote about Reacher in passing a few months ago. I’ve come back to him after reading Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin, where Martin sits next to Lee Child and watches him write his latest Reacher book.
I find the idea of Reacher deeply uninteresting. A large man who wins by using his strength. Compare him with my other recurrent fascination, Columbo, who confounds us. He isn’t even the smartest person in the room. He isn’t a magical Sherlock Holmes who can spot every detail. As he remarks in Bye-Bye Sky High IQ:
You know, sir, it's a funny thing. All my life I kept running into smart people. […] In school there were lots of smarter kids. And when I first joined the force, sir, they had some very clever people there. And I could tell right away that it wasn't gonna be easy making detective as long as they were around. But I figured that if I worked harder than they did, and put in more time, read the books, kept my eyes open, maybe I could make it happen.
And he does. He’s not smarter, he’s not bigger, he’s not stronger, he’s not even really better. But he works harder.
Compare that to Reacher, who is, for all intents and purposes, a superhero, pulled apart with great fun by McPherson’s article:
Reacher's fists are now described as being the same size as "Thanksgiving turkeys." It's time to get the old calculator back out. […] This would mean that Jack Reacher's hands are ten times the size of those belonging to a normal human being. But not so fast, because on page 83 of THE SAME NOVEL, Reacher's hands are described as "hanging loose, the size of a dinner plate." The average dinner plate typically has a diameter of about 10 to 12 inches.
Columbo, meanwhile, reminds me that quiet persistence outlasts novelty. The Reacher TV series is a reimagining of the Reacher films. Columbo has never been remade.
That’s all for today,
Simon