Transcription

This is the battery percentage on your phone, it's what you look at when you want to get your daily dose of anxiety, and it's also a complete lie. You see, if your phone cannot just ask the battery, yo, where you at, 69%, huh, nice, the battery just cannot know how much percentage it has inside. So what are we gonna do? First let's try to check the voltage of the battery, that'll do, well, no, because the voltage changes depending on the temperature and what you're doing right now. So okay, new plan, we're gonna count every single drop of energy that goes in and goes out. This is called Coulomb counting, and if we know when we are, say, at 100%, then we can add or subtract the energy and we'll know the percentage, right? Well, no, because any minimal error in this counting compounds and makes this totally unreliable. Also, batteries degrade differently depending on how you use the phone, so now we need predictive machine learning algorithms to look at how you use your phone for the last years and try to predict the discharge. So the simple percentage is just a guess, it's the best your phone can come up with after an ungodly amount of complexity behind it, and 99.9% of people just take it for granted. Just like how the iPhone screen is actually not a rounded rectangle like it seems, or how the Spotify shuffle is not actually random, or how there's one single pixel that is responsible for making Macs feel much more premium than Windows computers. And don't worry, we're going to cover all of these, because behind even the simplest thing that you do every day with your tech, there's a secret world of design decisions, crazy engineering, and tricks that play with your psychology. And without these, you just wouldn't be able to use your tech. And I warn you, once you notice these, you cannot unnotice them. But let's start with the stupidest thing ever. You have a text editor, and you need to build the navigation that lets you move around with your arrow keys in the text. How hard can this be? Okay, so we are here on the fourth letter. I hit arrow up, and oh, what the, why did we jump to the left? Well, as it turns out, letters don't have the same width. An L is taking way less space than a W, so this doesn't work. Okay, new plan, let's look at the horizontal spacing between letters, and I will write an algorithm that calculates what is the closest letter in the row above. So when I hit arrow up, I will go there. Nice, we did it, but damn it, now if I change my mind and I hit arrow down on the keyboard, I end up in a different place. Ugh, okay, so I'm still gonna use the shortest distance algorithm, but I will also keep a memory of where I was in the row below. So if I hit arrow down again, I'm back in the right place. Alright, but now if I move two letters to the left, and then I go down, I'm still at the old place, and we haven't even looked at different fonts and different sizes, and something as simple as moving through text turns out to be an absolute nightmare to build. Sometimes the complexity is not making things actually work, but dealing with the most insidious and counterintuitive of things, human psychology. This is the shuffle button. You probably use it every day on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music, and it doesn't work like you think it does because it's not actually random. This is the iPod Shuffle, and it was actually my first Apple product, and since it had no screen, it relied heavily on the shuffle function. But a lot of people complained to Apple that their iPod Shuffle was broken, because it wasn't random, it kept playing songs from the same artist next to each other. But as it turns out, this is what random means, because this is random, but also this is random. They're both possible permutations. So in order to make the shuffle feel more random, Apple ended up making it less random by introducing Smart Shuffle, a way to actively avoid having similar songs together. So what we've added is Smart Shuffle to actually make it less random, even though people will think it's more random. And yes, all the music services you use today do need to do this as well. Even Spotify naively started with a completely random shuffle, but they faced the exact same problem. And today, to make something as simple as shuffle work, they adapted a complex image dithering algorithm to shuffle songs. And all of this so that you don't have to listen to I am an island boy twice. But there's something you probably look at every day for hours and hours that hides something most people never, ever realize. If you're an iPhone user, this is what you look at every day. Ah, your usual rounded rectangle with a nice app grid of rounded squares. But what if I told you that this is not a rounded rectangle and these, your apps, are actually not rounded squares? Don't believe me? This shape is called a squircle. It's an in-between shape between a circle and a square. Apple uses squircles throughout all of their design system, and they use this shape instead of rounded rectangles because it's a much more natural shape, and it hides the transition between the rectangle and the circle, making it invisible. And guess what? Since the latest iPhone models use the dynamic island, which is, you guessed it, also a squircle, even the shape of the display of the latest iPhones is in fact a squircle. Everything is perfectly aligned and perfectly concentric. And if you want to flex at the next party, this is the math function of the squircle. So yeah, everyone will now want to be your friend. But not everything is about the visuals. Over time, tech companies have understood that designing products for human psychology is not an afterthought, but it's the most powerful tool they have. And it can lead to some genius features, but also to some pretty stupid ones. So let's play a flash round of genius design versus stupid design. First is pull-to-refresh. You know when you drag down the top of a list to refresh it? This was originally developed by Loren Brichter for the Twitter app, Tweety. And since Twitter bought Tweety, Twitter actually today owns the patent for pull-to-refresh. But today this gesture is so woven into the way we use technology that they just let everyone use it. Because it just works so naturally. It's incredibly intuitive and it removes the need of an additional refresh button. So this definitely falls in the genius category. But today this feature is used by the biggest social media companies on the planet, paired with infinite scrolling feeds. Like Instagram that shows you something new every time you refresh. And this is a key component in creating that feeling of addiction to keep pulling down to refresh our feeds. And this one feature is probably responsible for billions of dollars of value for these companies due to the extra engagement it creates. So it's genius, yes, but it's also geniusly evil. Next up is YouTube. It has recently decided that a great feature to launch is one that shows you videos that have a certain color in the thumbnail. So you can choose among one of three colors and explore blue videos, I guess? No one ever woke up feeling like, oh, I'm gonna watch blue videos today. So this one to me definitely falls in that stupid category. Okay, so what is the biggest problem of mapping applications like Google Maps? To me, Google Maps is one of the most fascinating, well-made and useful apps ever made. But it has one specifically annoying problem that we all experienced at least once. Google Maps is, well, a map. And touchscreens are perfect to deal with maps because your finger can move around. Great. But the end still requires you to do the pinch and it requires two hands. And when we use maps, we are usually in the car or riding a bike, and this is the worst possible time to require users to pinch stuff. So you end up doing this weird contortionism with one hand to zoom in. But actually, in Google Maps, you can double tap and drag your finger up and down. And this allows you to zoom in and out with one finger. First time I learned this, I was like, I'm sorry, sorry, what? I felt like an idiot to be actually working in tech and not knowing this even existed. And this is the problem. This definitely 100% goes into the genius category. But this genius gesture is missing an affordance, a way for people to know that they can actually do that. In the real world, this is the equivalent of going in front of a glass door and not having a handle. So not knowing that you can even open it. So let's fix that. In this design, we detect when the user is actually zooming and we show them how they can actually do the same action with one finger. But okay, come on, we've been harsh to YouTube before with the color thumbnails. So can they actually come up with a new genius feature? Well, look now below this video, because if I ask you to like this video or subscribe to my channel, the like button and the subscribe button will light up and animates to invite you to subscribe or like the video. Now I haven't programmed this into this video settings. YouTube is transcribing this whole video, understanding what I'm saying. And they noticed that creators were asking their audience to like the video or subscribe to support the channel. So they built a feature that briefly brings your attention to that button. This is one that sounds stupid, but to me, it's actually quite genius. And by the way, yes, this is also a sneaky way for me to ask you if you're enjoying this video, subscribe to my channel. But there's one item that you use every day that hides an incredible amount of weirdness and it has been around for more than 50 years, your computer's keyboard. So let's start with the basics, with the question that each one of us asked our parents at least once when we were kids. Why isn't the keyboard in alphabetical order? The modern layout for keyboards is called QWERTY because, you know, QWERTY. So if everyone in the world, billions of people are using this, it's because it's been designed to perfection so you can type the fastest and be the most comfortable and well, no. QWERTY was designed so that letters you type frequently together are spread apart so that the hammers on typewriters back in the day wouldn't get jammed when you were typing fast. That's it. It's actually slow, inefficient, and uncomfortable. But when the first computers came about in the 1970s and they had to add a keyboard, they just took the layout of what they had laying around, which is typewriters, and used that. There are many alternative layouts that could be much faster to type on like Dvorak or Columac, but since the world is on QWERTY, it's basically impossible to change it at this point. And these layouts are reserved for people that think they are better than you because they are tweeting using Dvorak on their Soviet-era mechanical keyboard. But as it turns out, keyboards are becoming the cool kid again. Originally, you could only interact with a computer via the keyboard. There was no mouse and you had to do everything via a command line, meaning you had to understand and remember dozens of complex commands to do anything, making computers extremely difficult to use. But then came graphical user interfaces and the mouse, which allowed everyone to use a computer. So in the last 20 years, programs and apps were mainly designed to work with a mouse, by clicking on things, and that's how most apps are built. But recently, in modern products, the keyboard has been making a comeback. Because the mouse is intuitive, yes, but it's slow. And yeah, keyboard shortcuts have been around since forever, but many modern products and apps have started to embrace keyboards way more, by making them the main way you interact and making you so much faster. The first thing Archive Browser teaches you to do is to hit Command-T to invoke the command bar instead of clicking on the URL bar like in Chrome. Apps like Linear and Superhuman are built from the ground up using the Command-K shortcut that allows you to bring up a command bar and type anything to do every single action in the app, but without having to remember complex rules like 40 years ago. And the ultimate expression of this is Raycast, which I use every day, and when I reached out to them, they also agreed to sponsor this video. With Raycast, you can hit Command-Spacebar and not only do your usual searching for files, but use your keyboard to give yourself superpowers. What's that day of the week? There it is. You can do calculations, you can play music and control Spotify, save and search for your clipboard history, arrange windows on your screen, and you can do basically anything just by typing. I had 7 different apps to do all of this stuff, but now I got rid of them all, and I just use Raycast. Not enough? There's also a store for extensions, so you can add as much functionality as you want. And thanks to Raycast's AI features, I now have access to GBT-4 right away. And since it's now running at a system level, it has context on what's going on on my computer. So go give Raycast a try at Ray.so slash Enrico. And I'll also put in the description 15 links you can use to grab a discount for the premium version as well. But I warn you, once you start using Raycast, touching your mouse will feel like... Bleh. But if you look down at your keyboard, there's probably some other weird stuff going on. Like what the hell is this? Or this? Or this? What the hell are those, and why are they on your keyboard? Well, as it turns out, these are relics from the past, but somehow they survived up to this day. Pause key was used during the days of command line computers to pause the execution of the current program, since there was no X icon. The insert key is used when typing, and it's actually not totally useless, because its purpose is to toggle between regular typing, the one we are all used to, and something called overtype mode, where any character you type overwrites the existing one. But most people just hit this by accident and freak out when they start typing weirdly. And finally, the scroll lock key toggles a mode where scrolling a document or page is blocked. So for example, when you use the arrow keys to move around a page, only the cursor moves and not the whole page. Now are these completely useless? No. But do they really deserve their own key on the keyboard in 2024? But there's also a new kid in town. It's not computers, it's not phones. It's augmented reality and virtual reality, and it's getting more and more attention. But huh. This is the Apple Vision Pro. And this is the MetaQuest. Notice anything? They all have interfaces with very, very rounded corners. Now this is a design trend that's been everywhere in the last years, but there's a unique reason why VR and AR headsets don't just choose to do this, but they need to do this. And to get to it, we need to talk about Kiki and Booba. Okay, so here we have two shapes. Which one do you instinctively think is called Kiki and which one is called Booba? Most people would say this is Kiki and this is Booba. Kiki sounds more pointy, just like the shape. And the shape appears as almost intimidating and scary. It reminds us of something dangerous, while Booba reminds us of something playful and it's less threatening. And this is the psychological reason why we are seeing this trend of rounded corners in all kinds of interfaces. But in virtual and augmented reality, this effect is multiplied by 10 times. A perfectly sharp angle is not a form that is common in nature. And what's it associated with? Danger. Blades. Weapons. Something that will cut you. And if in the past these were just windows on a computer screen, it was fine. But if you put them in a real space around you and you have them behave as if they were really there, this is where making them sharp rectangles make them feel subconsciously dangerous and threatening. As if they can catch you if you go near them. So this is why windows in augmented reality need to have extremely rounded corners. But sometimes what makes the difference is something extremely, extremely small. As small as a single pixel. I've used Windows for a lifetime, but two years ago I switched to Mac and there's something I noticed. Text always looks better on Mac compared to Windows. But no, this is not about the high-resolution screen. Text just looks more polished, more well-rounded, and this helps the Mac get that more premium feel. And this all comes down to one single pixel. But that makes all the difference. Because macOS and Windows actually have two different ways of rasterizing text. Text starts as vector lines, but eventually the operating system needs to turn it into a grid of pixels to display on the screen. When doing this, Windows is optimizing for legibility, creating this more harsh look but that you can read more clearly. And this distorts the font a tiny bit. And this is because Windows has to also run on very low-resolution screens in crappy laptops. The Mac, on the other hand, when rendering text, is optimizing for preserving the characteristics and shapes of the font itself. And this is why they push harder on anti-aliasing, creating these grey pixels around, to help maintain the shape of the font. This goes all the way back to Steve Jobs' obsession with fonts. And this is also possible because Macs have a limited set of hardware and resolutions that they're going to run on, allowing them to make sure that text looks great in all of them. So if text on your Mac looks better, you have to thank Steve's decision to take a typography class in college. So once you see how much thought, how much attention to detail, how much care about psychology and design and engineering goes behind building every single aspect of the tech you use every day, then why does it seem like this tech doesn't make us happier? Now, you've probably heard a thousand times that tech companies are evil and they want to keep you addicted, to make more money, but that's not the real reason. It's something much more interesting and important. You can learn about it in this video right here.