so this week I been grinding my gears about UI/UX while trying to design a reusable and updatable UI kit for my flagship tools. and I've come to the realization that yall don't really have any discipline when it comes to hospitality or the social sciences while designing a user experience. now let me tell you what I mean by hospitality in user experience. I have spent my whole adult life up to this point in hospitality as a guest photographer at a resort. and there’s this saying in customer service:
the customer is always right.
no tf they not. they stupid as hell.
and if your system falls apart the second someone is stupid, confused, distracted, or doesn’t speak English, yo system stupid too.
you design for the lowest common denominator. when I explain the photoshoot and the one free photo, I gotta assume they understood absolutely nothing. pull out Google Translate, use fucking hand signs, learn some basic Russian, idfk. because when the shoot is over, they better not think they’re getting every photo digitally. got me fucked up.
UX-MAXXING
my banking app
hey Maldives Islamic Bank, come here. this one's specifically for you.
FIRSTLY FIX YO BUGS IN USERSPACE. NOBODY GIVES A RAT’S ASS HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR CODE LOOKS INTERNALLY IF I PRESS THE BIG FUCKING BUTTON AND JACK SHIT HAPPENS.
just now I tried adding a homie to my beneficiaries. clicked “new.” nothing. incredible button. beautifully rendered. spiritually absent.
also why tf do you think your lowest common denominator would know that “beneficiary” means “person I can send money to”? this is finance bro speak. the average newborn adult does not know what that is.
banking is something every possible adult has to deal with. when we open the app, we wanna do whatever we came to do and get out of there as soon as possible.
I wanna send some money, look at the 69 dollars in my account, or pay with the scan or tap feature. in other words: primary intent. the first page you give me should optimise for that. there’s probably other stuff I am not accounting for, but dude, I ain't doing that for free.
it's kinda like optimising your looks for the specific type of people you want attracted to you. UXMAXXING. let's drop tokenmaxing before the year ends, yeah?
oracle you need some help
same fucking bullshit but worse goes to Oracle POS systems. bro, why does anybody need a total of 10 hours of training to use a point-of-sale machine? it should not be that fucking complicated. it’s a POS machine, not the cockpit of an F-35.
yall don't understand the people using it. this is just negligence, and it's absurd for a company like Oracle. it's not a complex workflow. it doesn't need to be.
this is basically backend engineers designing an interface around what the backend does instead of what the people using it need to do. a POS workflow is standard. you don't need six months of telemetry and a fucking research grant to know the frontend needs a rewrite.
oracle unc your company is big asf tf you doin? somewhere in that corporate empire there has to be one frontend engineer who has met a cashier before. find them. free them from whatever server room yall locked them in. let them redesign this shit before Stacy needs a ten-hour training arc just to split a bill.
Bark's law of UX
this is not an argument for turning every UI into five absurd buttons. that's oversimplicity, and that's bad UX. software should be shaped around its audience. on one side you got a microwave. I want hot food, not a relationship with the firmware. on the other side you got nerdsoft™.
complicated software isn’t automatically bad. I love nerdsoft™. give me a good TUI, give me yazi, give me btop. btop is more beloved than my mama, love you mama bless up.
the problem isn’t complexity. the problem is making people spend complexity on shit they do every day and could be doing on autopilot while they focus on what they actually want.
behold, a very scientific formula I developed without supervision:
$$ \operatorname{UX}(a)= \frac{\operatorname{IntentRarity}(a)} {\operatorname{InteractionFriction}(a)} $$
do not ask how IntentRarity is measured. that is between me and god. the point is simple: common action, low friction. rare action, a little more friction allowed. if I do it every day and you make me climb a mountain, yo shit trash. do again.
now, if all of that went over your head, don't worry. bark help:
➜ Monkey see banana. Banana low. Monkey eat.
➜ Monkey want honey. Honey high. Monkey climb.
➜ Jungle give vine. Monkey climb easy.
➜ Monkey climb same tree. Jungle make path.
➜ Monkey no care tree. Monkey care banana.
➜ Monkey no want banana protocol.
➜ Monkey no want banana settings.
➜ Monkey spend brain on honey, not banana.
➜ Common fruit low. Rare fruit high.
➜ Smart jungle help monkey. Dumb jungle test monkey.
Law of jungle, wheel good, why change?
now see what I did there? Monkey see formula, monke scare monke afraid, monke no understand, bark know. bark care. bark understand. bark help. monke understand. bark give vine, bark smart. bark get job.