iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

And bad incentives are at the source of why every app and website is bad - because no one is incentivized to care about whether the holistic experience is good. They only care about their respective interrogative pronoun. (this is my newsletter, you should subscribe to it for more Takes)

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

Why design goes wrong and how to set it right, part 1

At the root of design's crisis is an incentives crisis throughout tech. But we have tools that let us cut through the magical thinking of feature factories - if we're willing to use them.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

When you don't care about whether what you're doing will actually work - when you're given permission to optimize "how" (for a certain definition of how) and ignore "why" (for a certain definition of why) - you have the permission structure to turn off your brain entirely and Do Best Practices.

Pavel@spavel.bsky.social

Eventually, after enough product managers copy Google, the design pattern becomes a "best practice" and joins the canon of preferred methods that you can do unthinkingly, and then brag to your management for having done it. Don't measure results - it's a best practice so it is good by definition!

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

This is the crack in the armor through which AI driven "productivity optimization" creeps in. If the work is defined as execution, rather than diagnosis, you can just ask a model to do the thing. And when you define success as doing the thing, what the model is doing might resemble success.

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