Transcription

This is the volume control on your phone. Pretty standard. This is 100% power, this is 50% and this is 0. And well, this is a lie. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You're trying to listen to your guilty pleasure song so you want a really low volume. You're at 0, you press the button and damn it, it's already too loud. If I have a volume control and I put it at 50%, logically it should output 50% of the sound power of the speaker or the headphones. See, the way you perceive sound is not linear, it's logarithmic. Yeah, those things that you studied in high school. So to build a volume control that feels linear and smooth to your ears, you need to map the sound power that the speaker outputs to your linear control with a specific exponential curve. But if you're listening to headphones or speakers, this changes the curve so you need a different curve and this is why some volume controls feel completely off. Because dealing with all of this, it's a huge pain in the ass. Apple and Google realized this and now on iOS and Android, they use different exponential curves to make the volume feel linear and smooth. But you know who didn't do their homework? YouTube. If you're on desktop, try to play around with the volume slider. It does basically nothing from here to here and all the volume control is in the last 10%. Behind the things you do every day with your tech that seems so simple and straightforward, there's a secret world of design, engineering, psychology, tricks that play with your mind and once you understand what is actually going on, I promise you, you'll never look at your tech the same way again. But let's start simple because sometimes the simplest solution is the hardest one to find. This is the Nintendo Switch. You can detach the two joy-cons on the sides and use them individually as controllers. Pretty cool. But if you want to play in a more traditional way, you can connect them to this plastic grip. But Nintendo had a problem. See, each joy-con had LED indicators on the side, right here. But if you slide them in the grip, then you cannot see them anymore. So how do you make the battery level of the joy-cons show up in the main grip? For real, I'll give you three seconds to think about it. Now, many may say, oh, I'll put some LEDs on the grip. Maybe some contacts to transfer power from the joy-con to the grip. Or we can put a battery in the grip and then we can connect it with Bluetooth. These are all very modern, high-tech solutions. That's great. But what Nintendo did is the most stupid, but at the same time, genius solution. They just used a mirror. Inside the grip, there are tiny mirrors at a 45-degree angle, and they reflect light from the LEDs to show up on the front of the grid. That's it. The most low-tech solution, the most seemingly stupid one, but in the end, it's the cheapest one and it just works. Like this one. This is the Zenith Space Command TV remote from 1956. And this thing has no batteries, no electronic circuits, nothing. Because it defies the most high-tech solution for a simple one. Under each button, there's a different size rod. And once you press the button hitting the rod, it acts as a tuning fork, creating a high pitch frequency that's inaudible to humans, but that a receiver and the TV can pick up. Basically, it's as if each button is a different note on the guitar, just a guitar that you cannot hear. But arguably the most important mind trick in tech, and one that we've been using for over a hundred years, is the one that you're looking at right now. And it's how our brains perceive motion on a screen. So if you are on a computer, try to shake your mouse cursor really fast. You'll see that it almost looks like there are multiple mouse cursors on the screen. But are there? Let's slow down time. I swear there were many cursors, but looking at the recording, there's just one. See, when you start to mix motion on a screen and our human brains, that's when things get weird. This video is in 30 FPS and this ball looks smooth. But watch what happens when I speed it up. It starts to look choppy. Because it's not about how many frames are second on the screen, it's about what is actually displayed. The problem here is that between these two frames, there's too much difference. We can actually solve this without you throwing your screen in the trash, with some help from unexpected places. Mordor, for example. Let's pause this scene from the Lord of the Rings. You can see here that all moving elements are not frozen in time. They all have motion blur. And this gives our brains the idea of motion. So we can apply the same principle to our animation. And without changing the frame rate, oh, now it looks smoother. The other place we can steal from is Bikini Bottom. Ugh, what is this? Well, this is a smear frame. It's a single frame of animation that deforms the subject as it moves. And at full speed, deforming the subject gives the idea of motion. And again, we can use the same principles in our animation to make it feel smoother and more fluid. Apple actually uses this principle in the iPhone home screen. When you open an app, the animation stretches the app itself to give the illusion that the animation is smoother. But not all cool things are hidden like this inside animation frames. Because weirdness in tech is everywhere. Like here. This is a button. A button that you look at probably every single day. And just showing this button costs its company more than $10 million every year. I bet they're feeling really lucky. Yes, I'm talking about the Google I'm Feeling Lucky button. If you're like me, you press that button maybe once or twice in your life. And that's why it's still here. See, for this page, the homepage of Google flow $175 billion a year of ad revenue. So every single pixel on this page is optimized to the extreme to make money. Google even went to the length of testing 50 different shades of blue to see which one people clicked on the most on links. But the I'm Feeling Lucky button is still here. And if you click it, it allows you to skip all the ads and go straight to the website. So Google doesn't make any money. In 2007, Google said that less than 1% of queries pass through the I'm Feeling Lucky button. So even if we assume a conservative 0.01%, with 2023 Google search revenues, we get a total of $17.5 million. So why do they keep it? According to Marissa Mayer, an ex-Google executive, it keeps Google a tiny bit more human. I just don't know if that's worth $17.5 million. But I'm Feeling Lucky is far from the only thing in tech that is there for a weird reason. The Solitaire game on Windows. This is the most beloved app by lazy middle-aged office workers. But it's not a chance they added this specific game to Windows in 1990. See, back then, the mouse was something new. Believe it or not, people needed to be taught how to use the mouse. So Solitaire was purposely designed so that you needed to drag and drop the cards using the mouse, effectively teaching people how to use it. And if you think, come on, who needs the tutorial for a mouse? Well, this is one of the onboarding screens for Windows XP in 2001, teaching you all about the wonderful world of the mouse. And I thought video games tutorial were annoying. And if you're able to go for the very challenging mouse tutorial, today you might see this, the Windows spinning wheel. Hmm, this is a cool animation. It's probably a GIF or small looping video that a designer made. Well, no, this, this is a font. Yeah, just like Times New Roman or Comic Sans, it's called Segway Boot Semilite. And each character of the font is a single frame of this animation. They did this so this thing can be ultra optimized and run with no lag or stuttering on basically every device imaginable. And this also means that, yeah, you can now text your crush using Windows loading screen font. This, ladies and gentlemen, is peak level RIS. But the hardest thing about building tech is not defying this or that crazy hack, or even building something incredibly complex. It's dealing with the most unpredictable, counterintuitive, and annoying part of tech, us, humans, and our freaking weird psychology. So has this ever happened to you? You're doing something, it has been taking forever, and the progress bar gets stuck at 99%. And here it says it's taking five minutes, and then it becomes 35, and then 40, and then 30, and this goddamn thing is never accurate. So let's try to fix that. How hard can this be? Let's just throw in a spinning wheel and call it a day. Well, no, we're starting now to receive complaints from people that think the computer is frozen or it's not responding. And that's because progress bars are actually important. They give us the information that, hey, something is happening. Things are moving. This only makes you want to rage quit. Okay, so let's create a progress bar that counts the files we have to move and updates when each file has been moved. But then when we have a giant file and a bunch of small ones, this breaks. Okay, let's count the total size in megabytes and then see where we're at. Well, this also doesn't work, because copying many small files takes a bit more time than copying one giant file of the same size. Oh, and now our users want to know how much time it takes, so let's calculate an estimate. But this estimate is also wrong, because now maybe we started another file transfer, so the first one will go slower. So let's use a rolling average to get less 10 seconds instead. And designing a simple, plain progress bar has turned into a nightmare. And to this day, there is no solution to this problem. And this is also why when you see a progress bar that's too smooth, like in these scammy sites, it paradoxically feels weird and wrong. Now, it's clear that I love to discover the secrets, the complexity, and the craft behind the tech I use. This is Raycast, one of my favorite tools and also the sponsor of this video. And this is their website. Damn, this is cool. They could have gone with a random image like all websites do. But instead, they're like, you know what, let's make an incredibly cool animation based on our logo. And by the way, let's make it interactive so it changes depending on where you move the mouse. See, the design engineering team behind this tried different ideas for the homepage of Raycast, but none of them were really clicking. Any normal person would slap on an image and call it a day. I mean, this was already quite cool. But no, that wasn't enough. So he started playing around with the logo in the 3D Tools client. And he realized that you can get some pretty cool results by having the logo flipped over and have some 3D bars of glass in between the logo and the camera. And then they built an interactive playground to tweak every single parameter about the 3D visualization, including colors, movement, and distortion individually. And after many trials, they nailed the version that you find on the website. And people liked it so much that what was supposed to be just an image for a website turned into a super cool wallpaper pack. To me, this is amazing. This is what makes the difference between those that just do things and those that take the time and effort to really craft something. And this is why I use Raycast every single day. So let me show you how I use it. Raycast is a universal command bar for your computer. I set Raycast to replace Spotlight Search on my Mac, so I can open it with common space. I usually work with multiple windows, so I can just type where I want my windows to go, like left, right, or even more complex things like almost maximize. And I can build my workspace like that. I use Spotify for music, so I installed the Spotify extension from the store, and now I can search, play, and do everything so fast. I use different apps for making visuals, like Photoshop, Figma, Premiere, After Effects, and I have a defined set of colors that I use for my channel's branding. So I save each color on a snippet in Raycast, so I can just type and have them available in every app in two keystrokes. And finally, I'm using Raycast to access all the main AI models like Cloud 3.5 or GPT 4.0 without having to jump from different websites, but having them all directly inside Raycast. Super convenient. With the Pro version, you can access more advanced features like AI, but Raycast is completely free to use. Try to the link in the description, so they know that I sent you. And I'm putting also 15 discount codes in the description for the premium version. But now let's get back to the video, because there's much more that hides behind the tech we use, and not just in the software, but in the physical devices as well. Let me show you. This is a PlayStation 5. Pretty familiar. But let me ask you this. Does it look premium? I remember the first time I saw one in real life, before even touching or playing with it, it gave me the idea of a very cheap product. Or look at this monitor. Does it look premium or cheap? Well, there's a reason why, even though you probably cannot articulate it right now. And the reason is this. The centerpiece in the PS5 is made of plastic. It's a pretty standard material used in many products. So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that this is a very large plastic surface, but with a shiny finish. See, the main technique used to mass produce plastic is called injection molding. You pour hot liquid plastic into a mold to get the shape you want. You dry it so it hardens and you have your piece. But the only problem is that plastic dries at different speeds in different parts of the mold. So this creates these imperfections. You can see them as the light hits the plastic in different ways. If the plastic is matte, you don't really see them. But if your piece is large enough and it has a shiny finish, this is what you get. And it makes your product feel cheap. And this is also why in the renderings, the PS5 looked sleek and futuristic, but eventually reality and manufacturing products kick in. And once you realize this, you start to see it everywhere. So remember how in high school you learn all that boring calculus and physics? I mean, what even is a derivative? Well, that boring stuff is more meaningful than you think. And it's in weird places you don't expect. Take a look at these. Recognize them? This is Minecraft and this is Toy Story. But can you see it? It's right there. No? Both Minecraft and Toy Story use the same piece of seemingly boring math. And without it, they wouldn't exist. Look at this. This is Pixar's first short from 1984. Now, why does it look fake? Sure, the 3D models are not very detailed, lighting could be a bit better, but all the surfaces look flat. They look too perfect. If you take a modern movie like WALL-E, on every surface, there's depth, imperfections. This is what makes it real. Now, you cannot add fully random imperfections. Those are too random. You want something that looks random, but that still has structure and logical sense. You need organized randomness. And then there's Notch, who was working on a small indie game called Minecraft. And he had a problem. He needs a way to generate terrain, like hills, caves, mountains. So he tried to make every block a random height. But you end up with something like this. It doesn't work. He needed organized randomness. See, both Toy Story and Minecraft use the exact same piece of math called Perlin noise, a mathematical function that generates this thing, a random black and white map. It's not random, but also not too simple. It's organized randomness. In Minecraft, for example, Notch took the lightness of each pixel in the Perlin noise and mapped it to the height of each block in the map to create random but realistic terrain. Pixar, video game studios, and basically anything you see that's made in 3D uses Perlin noise in some shape or form to add texture and imperfections to plain surfaces, or even to make things like fire look more random or simulate water. And math is behind more things than you realize. And they don't need to be as complex as Perlin noise. The golden ratio, the ratio between the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, is approximately 1.618. And if we take a look, for example, at the iCloud icon from Apple, oh, look, all the circles have relative diameters that are the golden ratio. So at this point of the video, you might think, wow, creating successful tech products is so hard. You need to have insane knowledge of design, engineering, psychology, and yeah, that's true. But then why do even billion-dollar companies release products that fail miserably? Well, because they didn't follow the most important and counterintuitive rule in product management. Don't listen to users, but watch them as carefully as possible. Don't ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what. Take Microsoft Word. People kept asking Microsoft for one feature after another. Please, I need advanced formatting. I want proofreading. And Microsoft listened until Word became so bloated, complex, and full of stuff that it was a pain to use. But companies like Notion or many of these new note-taking organization tools took a different approach. Instead of listening to what users were saying, they just observed them. And that's when they saw that, oh, 95% of times people just use Word to take notes, write basic to-dos, and manage their daily lives. And what they struggle on is sharing and organizing them. And no user would tell you this. No user would tell you, hey, I need a minimalist app with databases and cloud sync. But just by looking at what people did and distilling their real problems, Notion is now a $10 billion company. This is how we got some of the most useful and genius features ever. In Gmail, they observed that people realized they made a mistake in the first 10 seconds after sending the email. So they added a delay and the ability to undo the send in the first 60 seconds to save a painful mistake. On iPhone, they observed that people were going back and forth to paste one-time codes they got via SMS. Well, now iOS does this automatically. Users suck at innovating, but they are already struggling with the problems that the next bigger dollar company is going to solve. So yeah, it all comes down to who can stalk users the most. Now, let me tell you something that happened to me yesterday. I was replying to emails from my raving fans when I noticed something annoying. I was trying to add an attachment, but I kept clicking on this other icon. This adds a link to the email. These two actually look kind of similar from a distance. But let's start with this one, the icon for attaching. Why is it a paper clip? Well, here's why. What is this? This is a floppy disk. Although for most people, it's the save icon. The save icon became a thing when floppy disks were everywhere. If you used a computer, you knew for sure what a floppy disk was. So that's where the icon comes from and why it's stuck. But today, most young people haven't probably ever seen a floppy disk. I barely used them when I was a kid. The icon has transcended the thing that originated it, and now it's simply the save icon, not a floppy disk. Icons are amazing. See, we are faster at identifying shapes than reading text, so they make us way faster in understanding what's going on on screen. Until they don't. What is this icon for? Or this? Or what about this one? These are all icons for share. Sharing is something we do every day, but we never ended up with one truly universal icon for it. See, on average, we take 500 milliseconds more to process an unfamiliar icon than a familiar one. So much so that in some cases, they go back to text instead of the icon. Take even this very screen you're on in YouTube. Liking something has a universal icon, the thumbs up, so there's no label. It's self-explanatory. On the other hand, subscribing, and especially subscribing to my channel, doesn't have a familiar and universal enough icon. And that's why they left it as text. And only once you subscribe, you see an icon for notifications, which is a very familiar and universal bell. But there's something else that's going on that's pretty weird. And you probably noticed it as well. Today, the worse something is, the more we seem to like it. Aesthetics have become messy and weird. We prefer idiotic nonsense memes to professionally shot ads. Bad things are everywhere. And as it turns out, there is a very specific reason why. And you can learn all about it in this video right here. I'm Enrico, and I'll see you in the next one.