Nothing survives first contact with users
Welcome to the Better Design roundup, where we look at the most interesting stuff in design, product development, tech, and policy over the last week.
Please submit tips and ideas to me on Twitter @pwthornton.
Business models and the Enshittification of products
This piece on the the Enshittification of of TikTok is good stuff:
“HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
“Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders, and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”
This is the core issue with starting a product or company where your business model is not aligned with your customers. Business models always wag the dog.
People complain that Apple charges a lot for its products (read: it charges enough to make a profit off the products themselves), but Apple’s business model, where a user pays for a direct good, is part of why Apple products have remained good and keep improving.
Apple’s business model is aligned with its customers. This is a more radical idea than you think.
It’s in Apple’s business model to continuously improve its products and customer experience. For Amazon, TikTok, and many others, their business model is directly at odds with continuing to improve the customer experience.
Nothing survives first contact with users
Product design guideline: Well-designed products require little to no training
Screen overlays, walkthroughs, helper text: If you have to explain a design, it’s probably not that well designed.
Very few products deserve to be complicated enough to require training. Medical equipment, airplanes, sure. Your random B2C website? Absolutely not.
Use thoughtful empty states, gentle onboarding, progressive disclosure, and other techniques to help people understand how to use your product. There is no better way for a user to learn how to use the product than using it. Utilize your product itself and its data and features to help people learn naturally how to use your product.
Here are more guidelines for thoughtful product design.
Voice AI defeats voice biometric password system
Meta introduced a new paid verification subscription service for Facebook and Instagram
This is actual verification, not the easily-scammed version that Twitter has. Whether this should cost money is one thing, but there is a need for this.
$11.99 a month for this service seems rather robust, but I am also not the target audience for this. Influencers who use Facebook and Instagram to make money and brands are the two biggest markets for this. If this service results in fewer scrams and impersonations while also bringing in some revenue, it’s a win-win.
Twitter Blue, however, is a bad product that has less than 300,000 subscribers.
We don’t need to do research
Poll of the week: Are you going to buy a VR headset this year?
Are mainstream users finally going to buy into VR? The Sony PlayStation VR2 is huge for mass market adoption. Apple’s upcoming headset could also be a game changer.
I do not own a VR headset, but Sony and Apple have me considering it much stronger than before.
Twitter ads are… not good
Elon is planning on shifting how Twitter does ads. Twitter ads have never been good, and they have only gotten worse since he purchased the company.
I disagree that Twitter should mimic how Google does ads. Twitter is not a search engine. People don’t come to Twitter to search through huge data sets.
I honestly have no idea why Elon think it makes sense to look to Google search over social networking competitors for ad market inspiration.
Twitter’s foundational problem is that users are too anonymous and are not talking enough about their hobbies and interests. Twitter needs to create features that allow people to connect with like-minded people in less public settings. This will encourage more deanonymization and will make it easier to target ads.
Twitter has developed a product that is far too passive for the average user. The vast majority of people using Twitter are just reading tweets. They need to find ways to get people to talk and connect more.
How did China come to dominate the world of electric cars?
China realized that they weren’t going to out-compete or even compete with established automakers of gas-powered cars. Chinese leaders decided to invest early and heavily in EVs and batteries. Other countries that haven’t made the same investments are falling behind because of it.
Before most people could realize the extent of what was happening, China became a world leader in making and buying EVs. And the momentum hasn’t slowed: In just the past two years, the number of EVs sold annually in the country grew from 1.3 million to a whopping 6.8 million, making 2022 the eighth consecutive year in which China was the world’s largest market for EVs. For comparison, the US only sold about 800,000 EVs in 2022. Thanks for reading Better Designed! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
“They realized … that they would never overtake the US, German, and Japanese legacy automakers on internal-combustion engine innovation,” says Tu. And research on hybrid vehicles, whose batteries in the early years served a secondary role relative to the gas engine, was already being led by countries like Japan, meaning China also couldn’t really compete there either.
This pushed the Chinese government to break away from the established technology and invest in completely new territory: cars powered entirely by batteries.
This is a good lesson for any company or country — lean into your constraints. China leaned into the constraint of not being able to be competitive with internal combustion engines. That leaning in directly lead them to their dominance today.