In practice lot of applications hard-coded some elements' color while following the theme for other elements, making dark theme unusable because you end up with black text imposed by the developers over the black background you choose for your theme, and other similar issues.
People can self sabotage by choosing a bad theme, and then they engage with the app less or even churn. Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
No, they don't. It's my system, and the look should be what I want it to be, period. What designers actually need to do is learn to respect their users, even when they disagree with the user's choices.
My teenager has their cell phone keyboard configured so all the symbols are replaced with cartoon cats. They can't type properly on it at all - I get text messages that are completely garbled - but they love that they can do this even though it actively impairs their functionality.
Some people like having ridiculously long fake nails that make it difficult to do their jobs (i'm thinking some checkout clerks I've seen who can't properly push any of the keys on their terminal), but it's their choice.
Certainly that's a good reason to force a legible version of settings, and the path to settings...
But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font
The issue with this thinking is that it's easier for people to quit using the product than to figure out how to fix the font. You can't beat the simplicity of doing nothing, so you need to avoid getting into this state in the first place.
Gotta keep users engaged in your app, right? Keep them onboard even if that means removing all their choices. I mean, should we even allow users to uninstall apps?
After all, the developer always knows best and all users are helpless children who need to be forced to conform and comply. Who cares what the user thinks or wants so long as we keep that sweet, sweet engagement.
If your users are not engaging with your app, you can't deliver user value to them. If you are unable to provide value to their lives because they happened to accidently changed a font that is an unfortunate circumstance where the user is losing out on value they could have had.
It's not that users are helpless, but that they just don't want to spend their time dealing with stuff they don't want to. Users like it when things "just work."
There is nothing wrong with providing sensible defaults and a good collection of pre-designed profiles to choose from (and yes, even a big, friendly RESET button).
But that doesn't explain taking away options. Users who don't want their time with this stuff would probably not use the customization options in the first place.
Also, the term "deliver value" has been badly tainted after too many companies have used it as an euphemism for "extracting value".
It's the same non-logic that advertisers use: Ads are both a service for the viewer, informing them of amazing opportunities, but also somehow the viewers must be forced into consuming that service.
I'm deeply skeptical of situations where people have to be forced into something "for their own good".
Targeting users who enjoy debugging and troubleshooting software is not the way to develop high quality software. You shouldn't be purposefully adding bugs or corrupting installations just to give people problems to figure out.
> and then they engage with the app less or even churn
I wasn't aware engagement maximisation is the reason we don't get customization options anymore, but it makes perfect sense.
No one used to care about this because it was at the discretion of the user whether they want to keep using the app or not. Whereas today, it's the company objective to keep the user in the app as much as possible.
That’s clearly bullshit because
if the user sets a system wide theme and your appLICATION follows that theme, then your appLICATION is not going to be any harder to use than the system itself nor any other appLICATION using native widgets.
What is actually happening is designers are forcing non-native controls, in part because web technologies have infested every corner of software development these days. Unsurprisingly, those non-native widgets break in a plethora of ways when the system diverges even marginally from the OS defaults.
And instead of those designers admitting that they fucked up, they instead double down on their contempt for their users.
Also, can we please not call desktop applications “apps” in response to an article about an OS that predates smartphones by several decades.
The colors is part of the content of the product. And it's not that it is 100% more likely for someone to leave sooner, but that it increases the probability that people leave sooner.
This sounds much like a post hoc justification for having not bothered to go to the effort to implement the ability to allow anyone (power users or otherwise) the freedom to customize the "app" to their liking.
As much as we love to hate on Apple's more user-hostile policies, it's only due to Apple's fiat that we've been able to claw back the smallest bit of user theme control --- light and dark mode --- from the "don't theme my app" people.
Oh man, I already spend way too much time stressing about size & weight. This is enough toggles to let you really spend hours trying to get it perfect!
Thin weights are eyecandy, but don't forget to also decontrast the color! Nothing screams "made by a designer" like thin grey prose that, if you're lucky and they hired a professional, sits precisely at the minimum of the WCAG contrast legibility standard
> we’re also expanding our language learning tools in the Translate app with improved feedback so you can get helpful tips based on your speaking practice. We’re also introducing a way for you to challenge yourself and reach your learning goals by tracking how many days in a row you’ve been learning, so you can clearly see your progress and consistency over time.
These NK operations are after salary and intelligence. The salary ensures the operation is self-sustaining even while it doesn’t yield actionable intelligence. They can keep growing their army of staffers until they get a hit on a prime target. And since nobody at the company meets the actual worker, they can rotate “employees” as needed – when a big score is in sight, they can plug their best hackers into the operation to “close the deal” (stealing cryptocurrency, trade secrets, or other actionable intel).
From the post, while it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that author did something wrong, they likely did everything they could to remove the suspicion. I assume they consulted all documentation or other resources.
Someone else's fault? It is unlikely, since there isn't (obviously) another party involved here.
Which leaves us to Google's fault.
Also, I mean, if a user can't figure out what's wrong, the blame should just go to the vendor by default for poor user experience and documentation.
Well they are calling out for help and seeing if others have had the same problem. And you can see from the responses that there are people having the same. So we are either all messing up despite not doing anything different. So Google has messed up something and we are all suffering because of it.
You're absolutely right, we should give google the opportunity to defend itself. What's the phone number google provides so their victims can speak directly with an informed googler to discuss it?
What's that? Google doesn't publish a phone number for their victims to do that? They just victimize and hide?
Okay then google, here's your chance: please reply to this-here post of mine, with a plausible explanation that convincingly exonerates you in light of the evidence against you.
I'll check back in a few hours to see whether google has done so. Until they do, we can continue blaming them.
Also waiting for MRIs. Maybe in some circumstances waits for MRIs were delaying some other life-preserving intervention, but this article does not seem like useful information.
> but this article does not seem like useful information.
It's basically a lobbying group to liberalize healthcare in Canada, so of course it's not useful information, its goal isn't to give people a good understanding of the reality, but to persuade people that the system is broken.
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