UX Collective

> But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes.

I've been researching eye tracking for my own project for the past year. I have a Tobii eye tracker which is probably the best eye tracking device for consumers currently (or the only one really). It's much more accurate than trying to repurpose a webcam.

The problem with eye tracking in general is what's called the "midas touch" problem. Everything you look at is potentially a target. If you were to simply connect your mouse pointer to your gaze, for example, any sort of hover effect on a web page would be activated simply by glancing at it. [1]

Additionally, our eyes are constantly making small movements call saccades [2]. If you track eye movement perfectly, the target will wobble all over the screen like mad. The ways to alleviate this are by expanding the target visually so that the small movements are contained within a "bubble" or by delaying the targeting slightly so the movements can be smoothed out. But this naturally causes inaccuracy and latency. [3] Even then, you can easily get a headache from the effort of trying to fixate your eyes on a small target (trust me). Though Apple is making an effort to predict eye movements to give the user the impression of lower latency and improve accuracy, it's an imperfect solution. Simply put, gazing as an interface will always suffer from latency and unnatural…

Today I learned all sorts of interesting comparisons.

The Apple Developer TS and CS is longer than The Great Gatsby.

Butler's translation of The Illiad is roughly a fifth of the King James Version of the bible.

The findings are different from Google AI search which says The NAB online banking agreement holds the record for the longest terms and conditions at 37,707 words and then a moment later says: AT&T's terms of service have reached an astonishing 383,077 words (proof: https://files.catbox.moe/bmdxey.png) [further, that reading the ATT TOS takes either nearly five hours or over 30 hours: https://files.catbox.moe/bmdxey.png] {This is actually mentioned in the article. Digging deeper reveals that the five hour time is the simple "please click this box so you can't sue us" against the entire set of policies referenced within said document: https://www.biggestlieonline.com/policy-length-analysis-2019/}

Reading the actual entirety of the legal agreement with AT&T would take 29.782 129 50 hours or 1 day 5 hours 46 minutes and 55 seconds based on the naive Brysbaert estimate.

The article that I vaguely remember from forever ago had articles that were not nearly so long as I remembered: https://uxdesign.cc/a-dramatic-visualisation-of-terms-and-conditions-f48443e12713

Shameless plug. I wrote a piece about The State of Open Data Portals https://uxdesign.cc/designing-open-data-portals-for-government-85e2524f5877 where I predict that it'll take a Google to really provide a single searchable dataset portal for the whole world.

Doesn't take a genius to predict, but there ya go! Governments are assembling datasets in a very fragmented way. It'll take a private company to provide one single website to explore and find all datasets from around the world, making it easier to look at holistic patterns that are happening around the world, or compare patterns between countries.

Though, I would expect a much better UX from Google nowadays. This site has more in common with Google Scholar than Google Search.

And ultimately I'd like to see them build something where people don't need to download datasets in order to make use of the data.

I compare the state of open data to the state of mapping software before Google Maps. You needed to download map files and open them on special software that you open on your computer to make sense of the data. And then Google Maps came along and flipped that whole model. Open data needs the same leap forward in order for more people to make greater use of open data.

I agree that there's substantial qualitative difference between sub-pixel antialiased text and the plain render. The former takes advantage of greater lateral resolution and perceptual differences between the primary colors. That said, I wouldn't consider the absence of that technique jarring. I intentionally change bright-on-dark text to greyscale antialiasing[1], to counter the halation[2]. All the links to images in the thread and the Reddit post you linked are dead, so I can't see how the text rendered for you. Did you by any chance experience this on a MacBook connected to an external monitor, where you had the system set up to render type better on the built in screen[3]? Your point holds though, they don't optimize for 3rd party hardware. I was a bit quick to jump in, thinking you were referring to the difference between their flavour of sub-pixel antialiasing and Microsoft's ClearType[4].

[1] https://srdjan.si [2] https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/why-dark-mode-isnt-a-ux-panacea-1590226e5ba4 [3] https://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/font-smoothing-macos-mojave.mov.gif [4] https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x/

Airtable — San Francisco, CA (ONSITE; FULL-TIME)

http://airtable.com

Airtable is a collaborative real-time database. Our mission is to expand human productivity by letting people create tools to organize their world. Unlike single-purpose apps, we think of Airtable as a toolkit of building blocks that people can repurpose to create their own applications. Our product roadmap is filled with interesting enhancements and additions to this toolkit that will push the boundaries of Airtable's capabilities.

Our users love us: https://twitter.com/airtable/timelines/566728799115440128

We’re hiring engineers for web (JS, Node, React), iOS (Objective-C, Swift), and Android.

There are 16 of us right now (plus three awesome interns!), with backgrounds from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. We believe in the power of highly motivated and capable individuals to accomplish great things in small teams, with end-to-end ownership of projects and rapid iteration. We’ve raised over $10 million in funding.

We recently released calendar view, which you can read about here: https://uxdesign.cc/making-and-breaking-the-grid-ee0741f86dc

You can apply here: https://airtable.com/jobs

> Do you have evidence

Ironic request given the lack of any evidence in your previous very definitive statement that it's:

> part of a trend in car design to cater to those awash with masculine insecurities or being told by the media they need to be more "manly"

But if you now tell me (below) that it's just "your opinion" and not a matter of fact then it's perfectly fair to call it "projection" (taking your personal feelings and generalizing them to others).

This isn't a PhD thesis. But fine, every other aspect of product design has been proven beyond doubt to be subject to planned obsolescence. It's not only reasonable to assume that aesthetics won't be an exception, it's also the best area to do it as it cannot be regulated in any way. It appeals to people's inherently subjective tastes.

You can probably find even better resources than these a short internet search away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Perceived_obsolescence

https://uxdesign.cc/planned-obsolescence-in-aesthetics-ad73cfce9338

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/car-companies-use-planned-obsolescence-consumers-buy-more-cars/