6 ms·

Optimizing for Feelings

89 points by jbegley 4y ago

goatcode 4y ago
Hunter S. Thompson would have made one shitty PM. God bless anyone who works at this company.
gorjusborg 4y ago
Oh hell yes. The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine. To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work. Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why. Trusting our gut is underrated.
- goatcode 4y ago
  Probably there are as many emotional reactions to some given aspect of software as there are people. How do you optimize for every individual?
  - rco8786 4y ago
    You take cues from our friends in the marketing department. You don’t optimize for everyone. You niche down to the exact group of people you want to optimize for, find their commonalities, and optimize for those.
  - gorjusborg 4y ago
    My 'angle' on this is about emotion of people working on the software project. If what you are building feels wrong, it probably is. Sure, some clever market-speak might be able to neutralize that emotion by showing a more flattering angle, but the initial reaction is usually the correct one; your conscious mind just hasn't caught up yet. If companies and individuals followed their intuition rather than being a slave to a paycheck, we'd likely not have the many of the dark patterns and creep-tech we have now. People ultimately choose to implement their own dystopia, a few individuals cannot do it all with their own hands. People should listen to their conscience and vote with their feet. However, it isn't solely the responsibility of the individuals involved to put the brakes on bad, unethical software. It is also up to governments to ensure that people feel safe to challenge their employer. It is also up to companies to foster a culture of doing right, then profiting, rather than profit at any cost. I'll go ahead and give the U.S. government and corporations an F grade on that right now.
  - davidthewatson 4y ago
    Personas? https://www.nngroup.com/topic/personas/ https://www.nngroup.com/topic/personas/
- blueflow 4y ago
  Emotions are guidance, not binding. If you are not able to manage them on your own (an important aspect of adulthood), they will get into your way at some point in life. Yes, they are real, but acting on your emotions unconditionally is dangerous when you are in a position of responsibility or power.
  - synu 4y ago
    I didn’t get a sense from the article or post you’re replying to that acting on emotion unconditionally was desirable.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    for that matter, unconditional anything is dangerous unconditional rationalism seem to lead to a meaningless life (i.e. the shitty kind of nihilism) unconditionally doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental gymnastics to let some symbolic-computable method dictate what we do... to follow this unconditionally is just as dumb as acting only on one's emotions we have (are able to do) both; so let's use both.
    - Dudeman112 4y ago
      >doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental It's best if we replace "rational" for "what I think makes sense" or "what I think is the best course of action", etc... Which is, of course, self-evidently what one should do. "Acting rational" is optimizing one's utility function to the best of their abilities and knowledge. It says nothing about the utility function itself, and using unconscious/emotional/instinctive thinking leads to better results for their appropriate places (including figuring out the utility function/what you care about) You don't do mathematics to catch a ball thrown at you.
  - bumby 4y ago
    A good piece of advice I've heard is that our goal should be to tune our intuitions so they can be reliable. Gut feelings are sometimes wrong and thus shouldn't be binding, but if we can improve their accuracy they can be extremely, extremely helpful. Is there evidence that we can train our intuitions? I'm reminded of the expert art assessor in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" who immediately knew a sculpture was a forgery by gut instinct. (I know Gladwell's writing isn't often held in high regard, but it's a good illustration for my question). Surely, we aren't inborn with the ability to assess art validity, implying it's a trainable 'instinct'.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  The other side of it is mediocrity. Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way. Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it. Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds. I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.
- golergka 4y ago
  Ignoring a person and self's irrational and emotional side is one of the most irrational quirks of so-called rationalists.
rochak 4y ago
Content aside, that’s an excellent font.
- gwern 4y ago
  I'd call it a "screen serif" https://blog.obormot.net/Screen-serif-fonts https://blog.obormot.net/Screen-serif-fonts
- goatcode 4y ago
  Your comment is optimal with regard to my feelings. Thank you.
pketh 4y ago
I would love to proven wrong but I’m skeptical that a company started 2 years ago with $18 million of Series A VC funding to repay and no shipping product is going to be able to optimize for anything but growth and getting acquired https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company
- scroot 4y ago
  They've been keeping it close to the chest, I think. But their browser exists and I believe is called Arc.
  - pketh 4y ago
    I'm sure it exists in some form, but it's not currently a shipping product
    - thaway2839 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure people are actually using it.
      - pketh 4y ago
        A private beta is not what I’d consider a shipping product, but you may have a different definition of that
dbgev 4y ago
I have an alternative proposal: optimize for the product of usefulness and performance. That is, optimize for (number of tasks user performs using your software) / (time spent per task) Actually measurable, too.
Vinnl 4y ago
> We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. I wonder what that would mean in practice. Optimising for your own feelings is easy, but when you have 100s, let alone millions, of users, what can you possibly know about their feelings? How about conflicting feelings, within the same person, or between different people?
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
This is what I do (I tend to write software that I like to use). Enjoyment and positive feelings are important components of my work. But I doubt my stuff would be considered "commercially feasible," and I probably wouldn't get VCs interested. I don't care. I'm grumpy, battle-scarred, and quite good at what I do. I'm in the enviable position (although I suspect many here would not "envy" me) of not needing to beg others to validate my work (or pay for it), so I'm fairly free to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I have to do. This won't get me fame and riches, but does make me happy. When optimizing for emotions, we need to be very, very sensitive to our audience. One simple example, is high-key, vs. low-key. High-key stuff is usually against a white background, and low-key stuff is usually against a black background. White and black trigger all sorts of emotions, and one's culture plays a big part of that (like, black is the sign of mourning, in the US, but white is the sign of mourning, in Japan). One way that I deal with this, is respecting Dark Mode. Purple is also another color that can trigger different emotional responses, based on culture (and what it is paired with). Americans tend to like simple, uncluttered, design-heavy interfaces, while Japanese tend to like busy, colorful interfaces, without as much attention paid to design. etc., ad nauseam.
jussivee 4y ago
"Writing manifestos about the state of the industry has never really been our thing." Except, their website feels like a big ol manifesto. And when I read it the first time, I got excited. But the more I read stuff like this, the more suspicious I get, and I get hit by manifesto fatigue. I want to see the product, and I would love to see something new in the browser world. The vision is beautiful, and I'm curious to see how that turns into a usable product. I'm pretty sure I don't want my go-to browser to be an artwork or a build-it-yourself type of thing. Function often comes before the feeling for a reason. A restaurant can't exist without its functionality. That "beloved dish that never fails" is not a feeling but a good product. I have a strong feeling this will be a very niche product. I would also love to be proven wrong.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  If you want to see the browser, you can do so here: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com (And if you're on MacOS, you can actually try it. I haven't.)
  - jitl 4y ago
    Kagi/Orion is a different organization and a different browser. Orion is WebKit, thebrowsercompany’s Arc browser is Chromium.
    - Vinnl 4y ago
      Oh whoops, you're completely right! Both just happen to be browsers I recently came across. Sorry!
chrisweekly 4y ago
Related advice for building your professional network over the course of a career: "People won't remember what you said. They might remember what you did. They will remember how you made them feel."
- april_22 4y ago
  this is very true
enviclash 4y ago
Feelings and emotions relate to values, which are learned at an earlier age, and cannot be easily changed. So yes to this view, but let's understand better what drives it from behind and use it in the overall frame. Are we not at all times optimizing for the values of the perceived majority?
temptemptemp111 4y ago
protonbob 4y ago
I am very hopeful for this project. I feel like this article perfectly sums up how I feel like software should be and how it should feel to use and also life in general. Software should be a tool to use and enjoy, not something that optimizes to take more of our time. Optimization has crept into our lives too much. Optimization of decision making that sucks the fun out of everything and makes activities inaccessible to anyone but those who want to optimize for it seems to be the predominant way of thinking. "How to optimize your YouTube channel for view, pick this $1000 bicycle wheel in order to optimize your efficiency by 1%.." I could go on forever. I joined the waitlist and I am excited to see what comes out of this project.
naravara 4y ago
Unfortunately I'm not sure people are even equipped to trust their own feelings anymore. Even in many spaces where people do have agency of how they're designed I've noticed a marked convergence in tastes and preferences over the years. We used to call it "Pinterest aesthetic" and now it's an Instagram or TikTok aesthetic but so many of the choices people make in lighting, styles of furniture, potted plants, and so on themselves feel kind of generic. Often like a cheap imitation of an aesthetic that predominates online. I don't know if this is a consequence of algorithmic recommendations tuning peoples' aesthetic sensibilities all in the same direction or if it's filtering down to the products on offer to where their options are all constrained. But it's depressing nevertheless. Part of it could just be an age thing. As an elder-millennial I came of age during the peak of vintage/thrifting hipster culture. There was a pretty vibrant spirit of mixing and matching and putting things together from myriad influences before it all got blended into a generic paste of flannel and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.
umeshunni 4y ago
I wish browser companies would just optimize for building a good browser. When they have too much money and not enough ideas, they end up writing hipster manifestos and end up like Mozilla.
vonnik 4y ago
feelings are just metrics that are harder to measure.
civilized 4y ago
I really like this but it's slightly different from how I think. I don't think "quirky" and "unique" are all that essential. We don't fall in love with the tilt of the ceiling fan in the restaurant, we fall in love with something else, and all the quirky details get a halo from that. The halo is so powerful that bland can become its own kind of beautiful, as the Costco cult demonstrates. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox are nothing but a collage of different shades of gray rectangles and we love them. I think what really matters is simple and almost tautologically obvious. Just... make your product really good at what it's supposed to be for. Facebook sucks because it's a social network that isn't designed for people to be social. Chrome was great when it was introduced because it was an internet browser that made browsing the internet extremely fast, easy, and organized (tabs!).
cy_overlord 4y ago
Has anyone optimized for the feelings of web developers?

89 points by jbegley 4y ago

Hunter S. Thompson would have made one shitty PM. God bless anyone who works at this company.

Oh hell yes. The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine. To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work. Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why. Trusting our gut is underrated.

goatcode 4y ago
Probably there are as many emotional reactions to some given aspect of software as there are people. How do you optimize for every individual?
- rco8786 4y ago
  You take cues from our friends in the marketing department. You don’t optimize for everyone. You niche down to the exact group of people you want to optimize for, find their commonalities, and optimize for those.
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  My 'angle' on this is about emotion of people working on the software project. If what you are building feels wrong, it probably is. Sure, some clever market-speak might be able to neutralize that emotion by showing a more flattering angle, but the initial reaction is usually the correct one; your conscious mind just hasn't caught up yet. If companies and individuals followed their intuition rather than being a slave to a paycheck, we'd likely not have the many of the dark patterns and creep-tech we have now. People ultimately choose to implement their own dystopia, a few individuals cannot do it all with their own hands. People should listen to their conscience and vote with their feet. However, it isn't solely the responsibility of the individuals involved to put the brakes on bad, unethical software. It is also up to governments to ensure that people feel safe to challenge their employer. It is also up to companies to foster a culture of doing right, then profiting, rather than profit at any cost. I'll go ahead and give the U.S. government and corporations an F grade on that right now.
- davidthewatson 4y ago
  Personas? https://www.nngroup.com/topic/personas/ https://www.nngroup.com/topic/personas/
blueflow 4y ago
Emotions are guidance, not binding. If you are not able to manage them on your own (an important aspect of adulthood), they will get into your way at some point in life. Yes, they are real, but acting on your emotions unconditionally is dangerous when you are in a position of responsibility or power.
- synu 4y ago
  I didn’t get a sense from the article or post you’re replying to that acting on emotion unconditionally was desirable.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  for that matter, unconditional anything is dangerous unconditional rationalism seem to lead to a meaningless life (i.e. the shitty kind of nihilism) unconditionally doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental gymnastics to let some symbolic-computable method dictate what we do... to follow this unconditionally is just as dumb as acting only on one's emotions we have (are able to do) both; so let's use both.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    >doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental It's best if we replace "rational" for "what I think makes sense" or "what I think is the best course of action", etc... Which is, of course, self-evidently what one should do. "Acting rational" is optimizing one's utility function to the best of their abilities and knowledge. It says nothing about the utility function itself, and using unconscious/emotional/instinctive thinking leads to better results for their appropriate places (including figuring out the utility function/what you care about) You don't do mathematics to catch a ball thrown at you.
- bumby 4y ago
  A good piece of advice I've heard is that our goal should be to tune our intuitions so they can be reliable. Gut feelings are sometimes wrong and thus shouldn't be binding, but if we can improve their accuracy they can be extremely, extremely helpful. Is there evidence that we can train our intuitions? I'm reminded of the expert art assessor in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" who immediately knew a sculpture was a forgery by gut instinct. (I know Gladwell's writing isn't often held in high regard, but it's a good illustration for my question). Surely, we aren't inborn with the ability to assess art validity, implying it's a trainable 'instinct'.
barrysteve 4y ago
The other side of it is mediocrity. Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way. Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it. Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds. I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.
golergka 4y ago
Ignoring a person and self's irrational and emotional side is one of the most irrational quirks of so-called rationalists.

rochak 4y ago

Content aside, that’s an excellent font.

gwern 4y ago
I'd call it a "screen serif" https://blog.obormot.net/Screen-serif-fonts https://blog.obormot.net/Screen-serif-fonts
goatcode 4y ago
Your comment is optimal with regard to my feelings. Thank you.

pketh 4y ago

I would love to proven wrong but I’m skeptical that a company started 2 years ago with $18 million of Series A VC funding to repay and no shipping product is going to be able to optimize for anything but growth and getting acquired https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company

scroot 4y ago
They've been keeping it close to the chest, I think. But their browser exists and I believe is called Arc.
- pketh 4y ago
  I'm sure it exists in some form, but it's not currently a shipping product
  - thaway2839 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure people are actually using it.
    - pketh 4y ago
      A private beta is not what I’d consider a shipping product, but you may have a different definition of that

dbgev 4y ago

I have an alternative proposal: optimize for the product of usefulness and performance. That is, optimize for (number of tasks user performs using your software) / (time spent per task) Actually measurable, too.

Vinnl 4y ago

> We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. I wonder what that would mean in practice. Optimising for your own feelings is easy, but when you have 100s, let alone millions, of users, what can you possibly know about their feelings? How about conflicting feelings, within the same person, or between different people?

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

This is what I do (I tend to write software that I like to use). Enjoyment and positive feelings are important components of my work. But I doubt my stuff would be considered "commercially feasible," and I probably wouldn't get VCs interested. I don't care. I'm grumpy, battle-scarred, and quite good at what I do. I'm in the enviable position (although I suspect many here would not "envy" me) of not needing to beg others to validate my work (or pay for it), so I'm fairly free to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I have to do. This won't get me fame and riches, but does make me happy. When optimizing for emotions, we need to be very, very sensitive to our audience. One simple example, is high-key, vs. low-key. High-key stuff is usually against a white background, and low-key stuff is usually against a black background. White and black trigger all sorts of emotions, and one's culture plays a big part of that (like, black is the sign of mourning, in the US, but white is the sign of mourning, in Japan). One way that I deal with this, is respecting Dark Mode. Purple is also another color that can trigger different emotional responses, based on culture (and what it is paired with). Americans tend to like simple, uncluttered, design-heavy interfaces, while Japanese tend to like busy, colorful interfaces, without as much attention paid to design. etc., ad nauseam.

jussivee 4y ago

"Writing manifestos about the state of the industry has never really been our thing." Except, their website feels like a big ol manifesto. And when I read it the first time, I got excited. But the more I read stuff like this, the more suspicious I get, and I get hit by manifesto fatigue. I want to see the product, and I would love to see something new in the browser world. The vision is beautiful, and I'm curious to see how that turns into a usable product. I'm pretty sure I don't want my go-to browser to be an artwork or a build-it-yourself type of thing. Function often comes before the feeling for a reason. A restaurant can't exist without its functionality. That "beloved dish that never fails" is not a feeling but a good product. I have a strong feeling this will be a very niche product. I would also love to be proven wrong.

Vinnl 4y ago
If you want to see the browser, you can do so here: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com (And if you're on MacOS, you can actually try it. I haven't.)
- jitl 4y ago
  Kagi/Orion is a different organization and a different browser. Orion is WebKit, thebrowsercompany’s Arc browser is Chromium.
  - Vinnl 4y ago
    Oh whoops, you're completely right! Both just happen to be browsers I recently came across. Sorry!

chrisweekly 4y ago

Related advice for building your professional network over the course of a career: "People won't remember what you said. They might remember what you did. They will remember how you made them feel."

april_22 4y ago
this is very true

enviclash 4y ago

Feelings and emotions relate to values, which are learned at an earlier age, and cannot be easily changed. So yes to this view, but let's understand better what drives it from behind and use it in the overall frame. Are we not at all times optimizing for the values of the perceived majority?

temptemptemp111 4y ago

protonbob 4y ago

I am very hopeful for this project. I feel like this article perfectly sums up how I feel like software should be and how it should feel to use and also life in general. Software should be a tool to use and enjoy, not something that optimizes to take more of our time. Optimization has crept into our lives too much. Optimization of decision making that sucks the fun out of everything and makes activities inaccessible to anyone but those who want to optimize for it seems to be the predominant way of thinking. "How to optimize your YouTube channel for view, pick this $1000 bicycle wheel in order to optimize your efficiency by 1%.." I could go on forever. I joined the waitlist and I am excited to see what comes out of this project.

naravara 4y ago

Unfortunately I'm not sure people are even equipped to trust their own feelings anymore. Even in many spaces where people do have agency of how they're designed I've noticed a marked convergence in tastes and preferences over the years. We used to call it "Pinterest aesthetic" and now it's an Instagram or TikTok aesthetic but so many of the choices people make in lighting, styles of furniture, potted plants, and so on themselves feel kind of generic. Often like a cheap imitation of an aesthetic that predominates online. I don't know if this is a consequence of algorithmic recommendations tuning peoples' aesthetic sensibilities all in the same direction or if it's filtering down to the products on offer to where their options are all constrained. But it's depressing nevertheless. Part of it could just be an age thing. As an elder-millennial I came of age during the peak of vintage/thrifting hipster culture. There was a pretty vibrant spirit of mixing and matching and putting things together from myriad influences before it all got blended into a generic paste of flannel and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

umeshunni 4y ago

I wish browser companies would just optimize for building a good browser. When they have too much money and not enough ideas, they end up writing hipster manifestos and end up like Mozilla.

vonnik 4y ago

feelings are just metrics that are harder to measure.

civilized 4y ago

I really like this but it's slightly different from how I think. I don't think "quirky" and "unique" are all that essential. We don't fall in love with the tilt of the ceiling fan in the restaurant, we fall in love with something else, and all the quirky details get a halo from that. The halo is so powerful that bland can become its own kind of beautiful, as the Costco cult demonstrates. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox are nothing but a collage of different shades of gray rectangles and we love them. I think what really matters is simple and almost tautologically obvious. Just... make your product really good at what it's supposed to be for. Facebook sucks because it's a social network that isn't designed for people to be social. Chrome was great when it was introduced because it was an internet browser that made browsing the internet extremely fast, easy, and organized (tabs!).

cy_overlord 4y ago

Has anyone optimized for the feelings of web developers?