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Non-Consensual Personalization

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Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#171

Post by marginalia_nu »

mrob wrote: post #170
maest wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much to add except wanted to say that I enjoyed becoming aware of the impact Wikipedia's design decision had on me, as a reader. Seeing the encarta/marginalia version vs the wikipedia one really drives home the point. It's interesting how the design had a strong impact on my experience, and yet I never really noticed it before. I feel a bit like a fish suddenly aware of the water they're in.

I was confused by the claim that the Encarta version is quieter until I read that it was because of the inline links. I thought the Wikipedia version was quieter because it doesn't have a distracting background image. I think this confusion is evidence that inline links are actually not distracting. I don't feel I have to make a decision whenever I see one because I know they'll still be there later.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#172

Post by scetron »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #141
marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…

There was an item posted here this week with the same exact conversation. It's honestly a bit eye opening with the way UX is going. I am all for sensible defaults, but being able to tweak things here and there should really be an option, and not one seen as a failure by the designers...

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#173

Post by dtjohnnyb »

From an accessibility perspective it's a disaster too. My granny is visually impaired, but loves watching tv. She's been able to get by for decades by memorizing the commands needed to get where she wants to go (she had a list of nintendo cheat code-like instructions on how to get to various channels she wanted on the satellite e.g. down-down-left-left-enter gets her to her show) We tried to get her into Netflix, but the menus change far too often for this strategy to be of any use. Of course you can use the screen reader/narrator, but you can imagine how frustrating it is trying to find the carousel you're looking for by waiting for the screen reader to tell you, it's frustrating enough doing it visually!!

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#174

Post by theshrike79 »

MandieD wrote: post #158

Related: over-internationalization. Just because I’m browsing from an IP address that appears to be in Germany, doesn’t mean that I want your site autotranslated into German with no way to switch back, even when I type “/en” or take other active measures to indicate that no, I really do want to read it in the original English. I also don’t want to be protected from seeing English-language content you’ve not yet trans…

Browsers have the Accept-Language header just for this. You can provide a list of languages, in order of preference, for the site to decide what you want to see.

But nope. No-one uses it. (I know, I have had it set for a decade at least.)

This is even worse when I run a service on a VPS in France and I get pages in French, just because of the location.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#175

Post by MandieD »

withinboredom wrote: post #145
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #77

Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.

Yes, “location” based localization is the worst when in a different country. The browser sends the preferred locale, they should use that instead.

I’ve been calling this phenomenon “over-internationalization, but “over-localization” is a bit snappier.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#176

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jdrc wrote: post #157
marginalia_nu wrote: post #130

I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy. Maybe it's from looking too much at the…

Children are the best target demographic for marketers. Considering the demographic decline and the diminishing numbers of children, the next best solution is to infantilize adults.

Once again we are reminded that advertising and marketing are the source of a great number of societal ills.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#177

Post by MandieD »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #77

Google search is becoming increasingly annoying. It randomly starts mixing results in local language. Worse they detect my location incorrectly and start showing results in languages that I can't even read.

The “best” part: when Google Maps auto-translates German business names into English, making it especially useless for a non-fluent German speaker to find them while driving. For example, a fabric shop named “Stoffe Bauer” was rendered as “Fabric farmer” (Bauer is a very common German family name, and literally means “farmer”).

Flip side: when sites force me onto the German homepage because there’s not a German translation of the English-language article I clicked a link to.

Stop trying to be so clever, and instead just make the language switch button visible at the top of the page for people who really want a translation. Like you did 15-20 years ago.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#178

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
jrockway wrote: post #15

I feel like the implication is that people prevent you from customizing stuff for ego reasons, but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI? But thinking about it more, I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients. Netflix should have a JSON API that's a list of all the programs, and each record should contain a link to video file. They don't do that because of DRM an…

> They don't do that because of DRM and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk. This seems like a 20th century philosophy. The point of a subscription service is to watch whatever you want. This one came out last week. You didn't know that one existed until today. You can't have downloaded it before it existed or before you knew you wanted to watch it. So…

> And if people actually want to pirate your stuff, the DRM empirically isn't stopping them anyway. It's just a pointless farce.

Indeed, if the past 30 years of digital piracy have taught us anything it is this. It should be obvious: it is impossible to both allow consumption of something while simultaneously preventing its duplication. All DRM does is make life worse for your customers.

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#179

Post by wongarsu »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #148
Swenrekcah wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment. They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on. It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new design…

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons. Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do. If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia: http…

The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato.

The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.

I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming

Re: Non-Consensual Personalization

#180

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

wheels wrote: post #116

The article mentions "correcting" searches as an instance of this. I find that particularly infuriating on Amazon. I often search for a specific thing, let's say, "CRI 95 LED light bulb", and it'll return thing that it determines are close enough. In this case, a CRI 96 or CRI 98 bulb would be fine, but it determines that because a CRI 80 bulb also has the same word in it, that it's close enough. (For context, the "c…

Amazon search is so bad it borders on completely useless. I've actually had an easier time using other search engines pointed at Amazon.
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