The LIES That Make Your Tech ACTUALLY Work

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🖖 Hey! I'm Enrico and on this channel I go behind the scenes of the design, psychology and stories behind tech and making stuff on the internet. I'm a tech Product Manager, builder of things made of pixels.

Behind the simple things you do everyday and take for granted, there is a hidden world of design, engineering, psychology, copying nature and tricks that make technology usable by humans. And most people never really notice it. There is so much that I left off this video (originally it would have been 40 minutes long): if you like these topics do let me know in the comments and I will bring you more of them!

source of the Microsoft Bob footage: @lgr

[enricotartarotti]

Learn how I ACTUALLY made my most successful videos with hands-on, practical behind the scenes breakdowns:

[Ash-tzgx]

UI/UX progressed a lot during all these years. But when you see your grandmother using your phone, you understand that there's still a long way to go...

[genghiskhan]

I find those small things you barely notice incredibly fascinating. I once saw a documentary about a simple object, an everyday pen, and was just mindblown by the amount of thought and engineering that goes into these things. Like, certain paints and materials that would be perfectly fine and cheap cannot be used because people have the habit of "chewing" pens; that's something I'd never have thought about.

Great video!

[maslelviz]

One more thing about the mouse cursor: It was intended to be used with your right hand. Whenever we take an item with our right hand, it will naturally lean towards the top left corner (let's say we try to take a pencil and point something on a whiteboard). Have you ever tried to use a mouse with your left hand? The mouse cursor remains aligned to the top left. It feels so awkward that I, as a left handed person was not able to adjust to this cognitive dissonance and I simply use the mouse with my right...

[rafaelHgrassi]

I used to build physical interfaces for products. Feedback is one of the most important things, if you program something without visual or sound feedback, it feels not just broken, but it is annoying. They call one of the more basic annoyances the "hard touch". People refuse to give up and add more and more force to change the state of what they are seeing and think they can control.
Another funny thing was to test and implement some add on or additional features, seem people just ignore it or worse, on being asked about it specifically or asked to test, saying it is useless.

[XENO]

I always felt that the phone keyboard is doing something fishy. It's so annoying to type rare or unknown words. Now I finally know why phone keyboards suck. Thank you so much! I knew it wasn't me!! 😂 I also noticed that sometimes when you tap an app icon very slightly, it shows visual feedback but doesn't open. I think these features are rather annoying tbh

[marlonpaulus]

That explains the countless times I mistrsuted myself for pressing the wrong button multiple times when I could have sworn that I pressed the right one...

[QoraxAudio]

Yes, the predictive keyboard frequently doesn't work and is soooo stubborn of typing a different letter than what I actually intend to enter.
I type modelnumbers and serials a lot, and those often give the most issues.
These keyboards make the likelyhood of making a mistake on a model number of some part/product much more likely.

[iggykad]

skeumorphism is still a pretty big thing in music production DAWs and VSTs, definitely can help out to make a bland UI look appealing

[Strawation]

skeleton loaders actually makes the loading feel longer than it actually is. That's because it's tricking my brain into thinking I can do something when I can't. The frustration is annoying

[PercyPanleo]

Something worth noting with the mouse cursor, the first instances of the cursor created by Xerox were actually poiting straight up

[Bonsees]

Man, I went to grad school for human-computer interaction and I never get tired of its design principles. Love how you explained some on this video! ❤️

[taliyeth]

What I find really interesting is that, a lot of the pointers you mentioned were psychological improvements are specifically the things I dislike in the technology: I hate it when the tech tries to predict what I want to do because it removes control from what I actually am trying to do. I untoggled the edge swipe because it constantly triggered when I didn't want it to. I loathe the skeleton loaders because it doesn't work for me the way you describe it; it genuinely appears to be loading for a longer time with it than without. What I find worse is that we don't even have a choice anymore; for simplicity's sake (by which I mean a substantially smaller workload), there's only really the worse option that is intended to _feel_ better rather than actually be better.

Unrelated, but one of my favourite skeuomorphisms is the floppy disk as a save icon, primarily because it's now a relic where kids nowadays just call it a save icon (unless they've watched the multitudes of videos that has now pointed out this fun fact)

[lihtan]

One of the things I've noticed about virtual displays, this also applies to sci-fi depictions of holographic/volumetric displays is how I subconsciously perceive the projection to have a sharp edge. That glowing 2D window border resembles a razor blade floating in space. Part of the UI design for the future is going to need to include an aesthetic tweaking, so that it has a friendlier feel to it. Something that invites you touch it, instead of something that might lacerate your hand if you get too close to it.

[Roccondil]

Regarding your mouse pointer example, I always figured it was angled that way because most people use their right hand to manipulate the mouse. If you hold your hand up and extend only your index finger, you’ll also notice the finger and hand are at roughly a similar slight angle.

[patrickbuswell]

Im impressed how the production values just goes up and up with every video you release. Very impressive to see this. Your subjects are very well chosen and you explain them very well. Kudos!

[CamdenBloke]

I have never ever ever swiped on my screen instead of using a back button. I didn't know that was an option.

One thing I really hated, and it hasn't been as bad lately I think but maybe it's just because of the systems I'm using, is when I was selecting text from a document and if I selected from the middle of a word it would automatically select the entire word. I'm very intentional about where I start and end a selection. If I want to preserve the last 'es.', for example, because I need it and don't want to retype it, then it's really annoying if the selection automatically grabs that and I have to go back and reselect to specify that I don't want it.

[Bobis]

i actually have an issue with the gesture controls that have been slowly implemented over time, when I'm holding my phone the palm occasionally causes a swipe back or causes resizing randomly due to poor palm rejection, i would often prefer a physical button over a gesture

[gFamWeb]

Im not a creative designer, but I am a very detail-oriented software engineer and I've had times where I see edge cases of interaction that higher ups just don't care about and it often bugs me.

[insu_na]

Honestly VR text entry should be done in sign language. I don't know sign language and I can't imagine that learning sign language would be easy, but it already hits all the requirements for easy interpretability, and it would also help a lot of people communicate better with hearing impaired or deaf folks