Dan Grover

Simulation Games Might Be What The World Needs Now

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 06:00:00 -0400

As with many, the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 made me dispense with a lot of rules I had set for myself, like shaving, exercising, and straying away from vices like drinking. Even the three meals in a day seemed insufficient; I couldn’t get through the workday without also having brunch, “Dinner II”, and “fourthmeal”.

But the vice that hit me hardest was video games, something I had largely sworn off since college. There were plenty of titles I’d picked up on Steam in some sale or another but had been too busy with life to try.

Most of the titles on my backlog did not hold my interest for very long amidst the unfolding disaster. But I found myself I falling hard for simulation games. We are, I discovered, living through a golden age of the genre. There are now countless, thoughtfully-designed games to simulate just about everything: cities, offworld colonies, airports, factories, transit systems, and more. And I gobbled them up.

One I kept coming back to, and what seems to me still like the apex of the genre, was an obscure title from a Slovakian studio called Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. The game tasks players with managing, in exacting, exhausting, minute detail, the planned economy of a Soviet-era republic, from the logistics of steel smelting, to foreign trade, to the provisioning of goods and social services to the proliteriate, to its power grids, to even laying out water and sewage systems with the proper grades.

Depending on your outlook, this description may seem like great fun or like a gigantic waste of time. During those months in 2020, when life felt like being stuck on a long, transcontinental flight with an indeterminate time of arrival, they were a relief from endless zoom calls, wiping down groceries, bickering with my spouse, and stocking up on masks. Tweaking the railway signals so that my imaginary republic’s bauxite could be more expediently exported to the Eastern bloc was a welcome respite.

Andrew Yang, who ran a stillborn presidential campaign that year, in his book “The War on Normal People”, devotes an entire chapter to “Video Games and the Male Meaning of Life.” Despite his enthusiasm for games like Starcraft and DOTA growing up, some time after college, he says, he began to treat it as a vice, realizing that “virtual world-building and real-life world-building are at odds with each other.” He goes on to argue that in the coming decade, a lot of men whose jobs have become obsolete due to automation and offshoring will fall hard for video games (as I did during the nadir of the pandemic). He cautions:

“A number of my guy friends have gotten divorced in their thirties and forties. Others have become detached from society. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. The world and relationships take work. You gird yourself for the workplace in a suit of armor. If you ever take it off and stop working, you get swept away.”

Reading this part of his book during lockdowns in 2020 made me moderate the hours I’d found myself spending on games.

It made me realize video games are, in this sense, a kind of fake work, in the same sense that porn is a kind of fake sex.

And while games are a versatile medium that can take on many purposes like telling a story, or pumping our adrenaline with combat scenerios, or even giving us a forum to hang out with friends – the sim games I grew to love during the pandemic offer none of that.

Sim games, compared to other types, are rather unadulterated and dry in their focus on challenging the player to decode and master complex, interconnected systems. They are not the sort of games that one might play when they are tired – they take one’s full mental faculties. Simulation games are, in this sense, the purest embodiment of the notion of video games as fake work.

I found it hard to fully accept this notion, though, or to fully cut out this habit, because I couldn’t shake the thought that there was also something redeeming to be found in Sim games in particular that I couldn’t put my finger on. So which is it?

* * *

As a genre, sims are nearly as old as video games as a whole. One of the earliest entrants, Sim City, famously began when creator Will Wright added simulated cities for the player to bomb in his Commodore 64 shoot-em-up game “Raid on Bungeling Bay”. Wright became so engrossed in building out this aspect that it became a key element of the game – winning required disrupting the enemy’s supply lines and industrial production in a strategic manner.

When he showed this element of the game to his neighbor, Bruce Joffe, an architect and urban planner, Joffe suggested Wright check out some of the works of Jay Wright Forrester. Wright dug into Forrester’s 1969 book “Urban Dynamics”, which lays out a computer model of the major internal forces that govern life in a city: its population growth, jobs, industries. Forrester, a professor at MIT, is credited with created the field of systems dynamics and applied it to numerous fields during his career. Wright explains:

“So I took his approach to it, and then applied a lot of the cellular automata stuff that I had learned earlier, and get these emergent dynamics that he wasn’t getting in his model. I found when I was reading all these theories about urban dynamics and city behavior, that when I had a toy simulated version on the computer, it made the subject much more interesting than reading a book – because I could go to my computer model and start experimenting.”

As a model, Sim City is not an exhaustively accurate one. Notably, it has always omitted or downplayed parking lots near buildings because showing them at the size and proportions they’re built with in American cities would look ridiculous. And it makes many concessions to make the game actually fun.

Sid Meier, the prolific game designer best known for Civilization faced many of these tradeoffs when designing the first Railroad Tycoon game. At first, he had designed the game so that the railroad bridges the player built were vulnerable to being washed away by floods and other disasters – this is, after all, realistic. But, as he relates in his memoir, it just wasn’t fun:

It seems like players ought to appreciate the hardships we throw at them—that the whole reason they play is to prove their worth. But it’s not. People play games to feel good about themselves, and random destruction only leads to paranoia and helplessness. … A sudden reversal of fortune is only exciting or dramatic when it happens to someone else. When it happens to you, it’s just a bummer.

Meier debated making bridges indestructible but ultimately decided instead to add different kinds of bridges to the game:

So rather than eliminate the flooding, I introduced different kinds of bridges. A wooden bridge was cheap, and would get the railway up and running right away. A fancy stone bridge was more expensive, and took longer to build, but would be impervious to flooding. By giving the player control over how much risk they would tolerate, the floods not only stopped feeling unfair, they became a source of genuine reward. To imagine their bridge emerging whole from the receding water line felt better than if it had never flooded at all.

This led him to a key insight that underpins all the games he’s designed – that good games give players a series of interesting decisions:

Interesting decisions are not about the specifics of what you let the player choose between, but whether the investment feels both personal and significant to the outcome. If you present players with options A, B, and C, and 90 percent of them choose A, then it’s not a well-balanced set—an interesting decision has no clear right or wrong answers. If players are evenly distributed among A, B, and C, but they all chose within three seconds, then it’s not a very meaningful decision. Any answer would have worked. Ultimately, the most fundamental characteristic of an interesting decision is that it makes the player think, “I wonder what would happen next time, if I did it differently?”

As for Sim City, even though it lacks parking lots, mixed used zoning, and incorporates fantastical futuristic elements like fusion power and archologies, it succeeds in capturing the essential nature of the reality it’s simulating: it challenges the player not just with interesting decisions, but surprises them with the unintuitive, emergent phenomena resulting from those decisions. As Wright explains:

“So we’re kind of enhancing dynamics, emphasizing them in a way where you can start seeing ideas, these kinds of truisms in city planning that we manage to capture. Things like the idea that roads don’t relieve traffic, they breed it. You think we need to build more roads, but when you put more roads in, it actually encourages more volume, and the traffic gets worse. Those are kind of counterintuitive dynamics that you can capture in a model like SimCity, even if it’s not accurately modeling traffic elements in a real city.”

These sort of counterintuitive dynamics always muddle public policy debates. A casual scroll through Nextdoor will reveal most people are not aware of the dynamics of induced demand on traffic that Wright points out.

During the early days of the pandemic, few seemed to grasp the necessity of stopping the spread as, even with Covid’s relatively low rate of mortality, the second order impacts – people who caught it from us passing it on to the vulnerable – were not intuitive (though this certainly be intuitive to anyone who’d gotten good at Plague, Inc.). On the other side, later on, there were many who remained overly cautious and argued for the continued shutdown of schools and other public places, not aware of the counter-intuitive way that even partially-effective and inconsistently-applied mitigations like vaccinations and masks reduced risk of infection drastically.

We also saw the bewildering economic impact of the virus itself and various policy responses. Suddenly, “supply chain” was the phrase on everyone’s lips. Goods that became in demand during the pandemic turned into a glut as preferences shifted. We felt the full brunt of the bullwhip effect, also known as the Forrester effect – first described by the same Jay Forrester that inspired Sim City.

The confidence Jay Forrester had in his models were common in his time. The computers needed to run them had only recently been invented. Ambitious efforts to use sophisticated macro models to smooth out the cognitive biases of humans making tactical decisions on the ground level proliferated during that era, like the telex network the eminent cybernetics researcher Stafford Beer set up in Chile in the early 70’s to hook control of all factories into a government mainframe.

Mitchell Walldorp’s “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos” contains an account of Citicorp CEO John Reed’s relaying his frustration with this sort of thinking in a 1986 presentation:

Basically, he said, his problem was that he was up to his eyeballs in a world economic system that defied economic analysis. The existing neoclassical theory and the computer models based on it simply did not give him the kind of information he needed to make real-time decisions in the face of risk and uncertainty. Some of these computer models were incredibly elaborate. One, which Singer would be talking about in more detail later, covered the whole world in 4500 equations and 6000 variables. And yet none of the models really dealt with social and political factors, which were often the most important variables of all. Most of them assumed that the modelers would put in interest rates, currency exchange rates, and other such variables by hand—even though these are precisely the quantities that a banker wants to predict. And virtually all of them tended to assume that the world was never very far from static economic equilibrium, when in fact the world was constantly being shaken by economic shocks and upheavals. In short, the big econometric models often left Reed and his colleagues with little more to go on than gut instinct – with results that might be imagined.

Reed would go on to describe how none of this sort of analysis would prepare him for the challenge of leading Citicorp through the era of 70’s stagflation and the ensuing painful macroeconomic remedy that Fed chair Paul Volcker doled out in the early 80’s, a situation now repeating itself in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. For this reason, Reed was an enthusiastic booster of the Santa Fe Institute and its effort to define new kinds of models that can deal with complex, emergent, collective behavior.

There’s a great deal of difference, though, between Reed’s teams of analysts at Citicorp and the average angry town hall participant arguing against apartment buildings or facemasks. We could all do with a bit more modeling and a bit less gut instinct. As Forrester argues in “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems”:

“The mental model is fuzzy. It is incomplete. It is imprecisely stated. Furthermore, within one individual, a mental model changes with time and even during the flow of a single conversation. The human mind assembles a few relationships to fit the context of a discussion. As the subject shifts so does the model. When only a single topic is being discussed, each participant in a conversation employs a different mental model to interpret the subject. Fundamental assumptions differ but are never brought into the open. Goals are different and are left unstated. It is little wonder that compromise takes so long. And it is not surprising that consensus leads to laws and programs that fail in their objectives or produce new difficulties greater than those that have been relieved.”

The actual details of Forester’s models that served as the basis of Sim City, for what it’s worth, have been criticicized for containing classist assumptions that inevitably lead to conclusions on the apparent uselessness of welfare or housing programs in cities, positions now held only by the most right-wing economists. ¹

The moral, though, is not that we can model these confounding properties of reality perfectly and thus make better decisions. Rather, by working through any model at all – and then arguing in what aspects it is or isn’t appropriate, we can make better decisions together and create better policy. As the saying goes, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Sim games, even those that dispense with any pretense of accurately modeling reality, do aspire to inspire players to take this sort of thinking to the real world. As Meir explains:

“With enough reinforcement, players may even find themselves asking the same question in the real world, where the choices are less clearly delineated. In the right context, a game is not just a vehicle for fun, but an exercise in self-determination and confidence. Good games teach us that there are tradeoffs to everything, actions lead to outcomes, and the chance to try again is almost always out there.”

University of Michigan professor Scott Page argues in his book “The Model Thinker”, that the key is knowing and switching between different models and knowing their limitations.

“To rely on a single model is hubris. It invites disaster. To believe that a single equation can explain or predict complex real-world phenomena is to fall prey to the charisma of clean, spare mathematical forms. We should not expect any one model to produce exact numerical predictions of sea levels in 10,000 years or of unemployment rates in 10 months. We need many models to make sense of complex systems. Complex systems like politics, the economy, international relations, or the brain exhibit ever-changing emergent structures and patterns that lie between ordered and random. By definition, complex phenomena are difficult to explain, evolve, or predict.”

The problem with so much of the way we think and talk about the problems in the world is not just, as Forrester argues, our models are fuzzy, but that we tend to tend to look for heroes and villains and clumsily anthrophomorphize the “emergent structures and patterns” Page speaks of.

For instance, the Bay Area’s current housing crisis, caused by the confluence of supply shortages and incentive-distorting laws at the state and local level is easy to blame on mustache-twirling tech workers and private housing developers (and never, of course, existing landlords).

Conservatives blame gas prices – the result of the macroecnomic policies the previous and current administrations, the pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine – singularly on President Biden, as if he alone can control the price.

Biden, himself, tried to pin inflation on companies somehow experiencing an uncanny spike in greed, as if was their previous benveloence stopping them from passing along price increases before.

Public discourse is awash with this sort of lazy thinking. We want clear narrative arcs and to know who the bad guys are. In History Has Begun – one of the myriad books that came out in 2020 to make sense of the unfolding geopolitical miasma – Bruno Maçães writes:

“My hypothesis is that American life continuously emphasizes its own artificiality in a way that reminds participants that, deep down, they are experiencing a story. The American way of life is consciously about language, storytelling, plot and form, and is meant to draw attention to its status as fiction.”

The American political landscape, in Maçães’s view, has been uniquely shaped by TV and movies as media. He traces this from the rise of JFK and Reagan to more contemporary figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Trump. In criticizing AOC’s “Green New Deal” and the way she rolled it out, he notes:

Like all quests, the Green New Deal is set in a kind of dreamland, which allows its authors to increase the dramatic elements of struggle and conflict, but at the obvious cost of divorcing themselves from social and historical reality. The detailed consideration of technological and economic forces, for example, is ignored. The causal nexus between problem and solution appears fanciful. Since the authors of the Green New Deal have invented the story, they alone know the logic of events. There are perplexing elements in this logic. Why, for example, would one want to rebuild every building in America in order to increase energy efficiency when we are getting all our energy from zero-emission sources anyway? But a dream world follows different rules from those we know from the real one, which only increases its powers of attraction.

In the book, though, Maçães saves most of his ire for Trump:

At times it looks as if Trump simply does not know any better. He owes his elevation to the highest office in the land to reality television and intends to continue exploring its resources from the telepulpit of the White House. Over and over again he has striven to produce a vision of political events “real enough to be compelling but fantastical enough to be entertaining.” All the defining traits of television are there: the episode form, the continued interaction between writers and producers on one hand and the public on the other, and the logic of spectacle taking things to an extreme. The great wall, the witch hunt, the atomic button, the “king of China”. As for the direct relation to the viewing public—the New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum calls it “a messily intense feedback loop between viewers and creators”. Donald Trump imitates reality television stars with his furious Twitter activity but goes much beyond television by offering what no reality show could dream about: the prospect of changing the course of world history. Democracy may be redefined as the ability to get the show we want.

It’s arguable, then, that one counterweight to this melodramatic, narrative-infused fantasy worldview inflicted by too many movies is, of course, simulation games. While other video games may be little removed from this outlook – Call of Duty is not substantively different from Saving Private Ryan – simulation games do not afford us the scaffolding of narrative. They have no characters, no conflicts, no lore, only models for us to painstakingly figure out. They are what Marshall MacLuhan would term a “cool” medium. As Wright points out in an interview in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions:

“A lot of games are built around a movie model, where there’s a beginning, middle, and end; perhaps there’s some dramatic climax, or you’re defeating evil. The Sim games are more like a hobby where you kind of approach, and you have a shared interest with other people, and you can take the aspects that interest you most and really focus on those.”

Indeed, in the real world, few major choices leaders make are clear-cut or justly be cast as heroes or villains on just the direct consequences of their actions. Sid Meier writes that the process of designing Civilization, underscored this point to him:

Of all the things Civilization taught me, I never expected one of them to be empathy for politicians. It’s easy to criticize leaders for their choices, but it only takes a few rounds of nation-building before you begin to appreciate that it’s not as easy as it looks. Everything comes with a price — and if playing a game of Civ gives you a bit of perspective, then designing one gives you a whole wagon train of it.

Meier would face questions and criticisms on Civilization’s accuracy – like why, when, playing as Montezema, you start out with bronze working when the Aztecs were more well known for their pottery – or why it glosses over subjects like slavery. But, as he goes on to argue, whether it’s realistic isn’t the point:

“Are Aesop’s fables meaningless because real mice can’t talk? What we encourage is knowledge-seeking in itself, and ownership of one’s beliefs. We want you to understand that choices have consequences, that a country’s fate can turn on a single act of diplomacy, and that historical figures were not black-and-white paragons of good and evil—not because we’ve told you, but because you’ve faced those complex dilemmas for yourself.”

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke argues a similar point – positing that games like Factorio teach transferrable skills for dealing with complex strategic tradeoffs that aren’t taught in business books. It’s difficult at first to imagine this at first with a game like Factorio in particular. After all, it doesn’t even come close to simulating reality – its object is to build and streamline a factory on a hostile alien planet whose purpose seems, perversely, to be to produce the materials needed to further expand the factory.

But even the most unrealistic sim games speak directly to this ever-present, essential, structural truth to the reality we inhabit. These games reenforce that the world is always more complicated than it looks. They teach us that the laws governing the material outcomes we live with don’t care at all about our virtue or intentions – that the Covid virus doesn’t care whether you trust Tony Fauci and the supply chain doesn’t care whether you’d prefer the items you purchase be made in your own country. And most importantly, they teach us how to model, analyze, and problem-solve in the face of such a complex, cruel, and indifferent world and ignore hucksters offering us easy remedies.

* * *

I wondered if that was all there was to it – that Sim games are created by people who love to dork out about models to bring this way of thinking to the public. If so, what is it that makes them so compelling? What psychological needs would drive the creators to go through the drudgery of creating them. Are they the same as those that keep us hooked playing them?

In his memoir, Sid Meier, quoted earlier, talks about the genesis of the Railroad Tycoon series and “Railroads!”. One summer in his childhood, for reasons he wasn’t aware of at the time, his parents sent him away to live with his extended family in Switzerland. He became enamored with railroads there, in all of their characteristicly Swiss efficiency:

“The train platform served double duty as the town’s central plaza, and included a smattering of shops where one relative or another would occasionally buy me a treat. But even without the promise of ice cream, I soon found myself hiking there alone each day to watch the trains…

The trains always came in exactly on time, one after the other. I waited for one to be a minute early, or two minutes late, but they never were. Somehow, the trains just knew.

My grandfather got me a copy of the train schedule, a thick book that held the times for every train in every station across Switzerland. I began to learn which engines made which routes, and mentally follow a particular train’s path in the book for days until it returned once again to our little township of Bülach. The efficiency of the whole thing was both awe-inspiring and deeply satisfying, and I tried to imagine the person who ran the system, planning and coordinating and never being off by even a single minute.”

Initially after arriving there, Meier had been miserable, writing his parents mopey letters wanting to return. But later he learned to enjoy life there, not just for the magnificent Swiss railway system, but the way he got along with kids there. By the end of the summer, he wrote his parents asking to extend his stay and enroll in primary school there, having picked up enough Swiss to enroll in a local school. He was ecstatic when they agreed.

After a year or so, he returned to the US. These memories inspired him to build a model railroad with his dad:

“It never really got finished, although I think that might be an intended feature of model railroading in general. It did, however, manage to take over the whole dining room. First we had to construct a large wooden frame for our future track to sit on, and then my father brought in rolls of chicken wire to sculpt a papier-mâché landscape over it. It was clear he enjoyed the painting and crafting more than the trains themselves, but they had recently become an obsession of mine, so he was willing to compromise for the sake of father-son bonding.”

The introduction cinematic to Meir’s later game “Railroads!”, the spiritual successor to his earlier Railroad Tycoon franchise, depicts a model railroad, no doubt like the one he built with his father:

Many years later, Meier connected the dots about that time in his childhood, which until then, he had mostly remembered being about trains and ice cream. Around then, he’d lost his teenage sister Dorothy to Hodgkin’s lymphoma:

“I can remember my mother leaving me home alone in the evenings while she visited my sister in the hospital. I remember the quarter she’d give me each night to buy a bag of chips across the street, and watching the old sitcom My Mother the Car while I waited for her return. I remember getting only vague answers, but understanding enough to know that Dorothy wouldn’t be coming home with her any time soon… I remember walking to school alone. I remember visiting her gravesite with my father, flowers in hand.

And I remember considering for the first time, many decades later, that my trip to Switzerland may have served at least partially to shield me from what was going on at home, and that lengthening the stay might not have been entirely, 100 percent my idea.”

Will Wright, like Meier, grew up building models with his father, who would pass away from leukemia when he was only nine. As an adult, some years after publishing the first SimCity game, Wright lost his house in the 1991 firestorm in Oakland. According to a New Yorker article, this inspired another intellectual foray that would lead to The Sims:

Over the next half hour, the smoke got worse. “I thought, Uh-oh, this isn’t trending well.” He and his wife decided it was time to evacuate (Cassidy was away at a friend’s house). They grabbed some family photos, jumped into Jones’s car, and drove away. When they returned, three days later, the Oakland Hills firestorm had destroyed everything. Nothing was left except for some lumps of melted metal, the remains of their other car. In the months that followed, as Wright went about replacing his belongings, he started thinking about all the things people needed. “I hate to shop,” he said, “and I was forced to buy all these things, from toothpaste, utensils, and socks up to furniture.”

Where SimCity had been inspired by the works of Jay Forrester, this time, he discovered new influences which led him to ultimately create The Sims:

Three works helped Wright understand how he could turn these life experiences into a game. One was the book “A Pattern Language,” by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley. The book identifies two hundred and fifty-three timeless ways of building, which are classified as patterns—“Stair Seats,” “Children’s Realm,” etc.—and it shows how these patterns can create satisfying living spaces. The idea is that the value of architecture can be measured by the happiness of the people who live in it. The second was the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which Maslow described a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of human needs, with “Physiological” at the bottom, and above it “Safety,” “Love,” “Esteem,” and, at the top, “Self-actualization.” The third inspiration was Charles Hampden-Turner’s “Maps of the Mind,” which compares more than fifty theories about how the mind works. Putting these works together, Wright formulated a model with which to “score” the happiness of the people in his doll house by their status, popularity, and success, and by the quality of the environment the player designs for them—the more comfortable the house, the happier the people. Wright told me, “I don’t believe any one theory of human psychology is correct. The Sims just ended up being a mishmash of stuff that worked in the game.”

One can see clear inspiration from Maslow in the various meters that would show a decade later up for one’s characters in The Sims.

But even more concretely, a disaster scenario that ships with the earlier Sim City 2000 literally challenges players to handle the disasterous firestorm that struck the Oakland hills and engulfed Wright’s house on that fateful day in 1991:

The creators of my beloved Soviet Republic have suffered, too. A frequent request from fans is to add things like army bases and gulags. After all, the Tropico series – which has a lot in common with Soviet Republic – incorporates this well, adding a realtime strategy element where players must fight off coups and invasion attempts of their banana republic, and the abilility to assasinate or frame leaders of rival factions.

Tropico can treat its setting with the removed, irreverent cheekiness that has become a hallmark of the series because its designers did not live under despots like Castro or Chavez. But the Soviet Republic team lived through the horrors of socialism in Czechloslovakia, where even until the 80’s, intellectuals and dissidents were silenced and exiled. They argue that had it not been for the fall of socialism in their country, their game wouldn’t have come to exist. They’ve thus resisted all requests to add more political or military elements to the game:

“Last work week in Slovakia was shorter. On Tuesday 17th November we had a national holiday which we celebrate to remember the fall of socialistic regime. This is important to mention because many people may misunderstand the inspiration we draw when creating the basics of this game. We are glad that the regime has fallen because there is more freedom than there was before.
…
There are calls for implementing those terrifying political aspects of Soviet era into the game because people want to repress their workers and control them instead of taking care of their needs and making them happy.
…
The game itself is an utopia which cannot exist in real world as there are always people who want to have power, who want to control and satisfy their own selfish needs at any cost by repressing and manipulating with lives of others in name of some ideology they use to gain power. If you look back socialism is never about what people want and need but what political leaders proclaim as their ideology.”

After the outbreak of the recent Ukraine war, developers volunteered helping refugees and even released the game’s first ever DLC package, featuring classic Ukranian buildings and vehicles, which they sold to raise money for the Red Cross. They re-enforced their message of pacifism:

“There is no military in the game right now and many players like that the game is peaceful and economy oriented. Our hope is that we have taken something from the past that made sense from game’s perspective and made it into a game where you can play and have fun, but in real life things are different. The real world is not that simple and not that peaceful as our game is.”

Stories like these made me realize many of my favorite sim games were borne of some tragedy in their creators’ lives – and the resulting desire to bring order, clarity, and meaning to them, which is no doubt also what draws us to them as players.

It made me think back to Andrew Yang’s framing of video games. As he argues:

“I still understand and appreciate video games on a visceral level. I even imagine that I could get into them again. They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.”

But Yang’s central framing in the chapter still rings hollow to me – the idea of video games as sirens, using “fake world-building” to seduce otherwise capable young men away from “real world-building.” This tendency and the psychological need he’s getting at seems older than video games.

Maybe there’s always been something funny about men² in this way. Sometimes the only way for us to cope and come to terms with our feelings on, say, the death of a sibling, or getting divorced, or the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, or bond with each other, are through these silly, useless things like model railroads, baseball, superflous home improvement projects, and, of course, overly complicated simulation and strategy video games.

Maybe, when these kinds of moods strike us, we desire fake work even more than fake sex. To the extent that these sort of games could be described as escapism, it is in that they offer an escape not to any fantastical, exotic world, but simply to one where we can, for a moment, feel that we are useful in and have a modicum of control over. One where our where our efforts yield fruit – and one’s little railroad bridges don’t just get washed away for no reason, one’s house doesn’t burn down, the Russians don’t invade, and one’s loved ones aren’t taken away far too early, because none of those things are in the model. Even if it is, at the end of the day, all fake.

Ultimately, then, maybe sim games can be both of these things. They are, indeed, a time-sucking vice catering to this particular kind of nihlistic desire to escape a real world that makes us feel confused and purposeless. To see the total number of hours I’ve spent on a game displayed in Steam still gives me a momentary feeling of shame.

Yet this fake world-building cannot always fully supplant real world-building. Sim games inspire us to approach the real world with new eyes when we re-emerge, seeing it as the complex, interconnected, counter-intuitive mess it truly is, and one which we can, only with discipline, thoughtfulness, and careful compromise, set out to better.

FOOTNOTES

The game CityState, a brilliant spin on the city building subgenre that focuses on social and economic policy, has faced similar criticism – that it is nearly impossible to win with more socialistic policies. Its developer responds that he’s not sure whether this is a bug with the game or with socialism. It is hard to get around the fact that the trouble is you eventually run out of other people’s money. It’s possible, though, to lose with either extreme in the game – a lack of policies to promote a social ladder will also hold back economic progress. ↩
I hope it doesn’t come off as sexist that identify this tendancy with men, as Yang does, simply because I have never seen any women get as drawn into these sorts of games as men do, or to the sort of destructive ends he describes, but I’m sure there are many! ↩

How Chinese Apps Handled Covid-19

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 06:00:00 -0400

Summary: China’s apps played a pivotal role in supporting some of the most effective tactics the country used in fighting Covid-19, including the use of fever clinics and the strict quarantining of individuals based on their risk level. Apps there exposed a plethora of tools to keep people healthy, well-stocked, and at-ease during the crisis. Chinese tech companies’ swift response was not only in service of public good, but also of their private agendas, to compete with each other and create new habits and sources of lock-in. Here in Silicon Valley, this should invite reflection on what more we can do.

I used to blog a lot about product design in China, but since moving back to the US, I’ve relinquished myself to being a mere spectator, as my first-hand knowledge became outdated.

But as I’ve sat quarantined the past month and followed the story through Chinese apps and media, I realized it was so damned interesting that I couldn’t not share it. And besides, there’s nothing on Netflix.

PSAs, Info Centers, and Tools

Every major Chinese app has added dedicated hubs for the Coronavirus. They’ve all smoothly integrated tons of different tools to help people get through the crisis, including:

Statistics: Apps scraped the figures from the National Health Commission reformatted, resliced, and visualized in it in myriad ways.¹
Check Your Exposure: Multiple tools let people check whether other passengers of specific planes and trains they’d been on had been diagnosed (this information aggregated by the State Council). Independently-developed let people even check individual apartment blocks.
E-Medicine: Maps directing people to the nearest fever clinics and ICUs. Online consultations and perscriptions, as well as psychogical counseling.
E-Commerce: Masks, hand sanitizer, and more, through each app’s preferred partners. Additional tools let users check the quality of a mask given its serial number, view the quantities of masks at stores near them, and report price gouging.
Tools for Quarantine: Before Health QR Codes (described below) launched, other tools helped individual communities take roll calls and keep records.

As interesting as the array of services on offer is, equally interesting is the way app developers decided to surface them in their apps. But to save you all the inside baseball, you can see these details by clicking into the screenshots below:

Yes, there’s certainly a lot going on here, and we could go on forever looking at each of these features.

The two worth examining more closely are how apps helped people get care and the rise of Health QR Codes.

Getting Care

In a New York Times interview, the WHO’s Bruce Aylward pointed out a few distinctive features of the Chinese response to Covid-19, including the use of online medicine and fever clinics:

How did the Chinese reorganize their medical response?

First, they moved 50 percent of all medical care online so people didn’t come in. Have you ever tried to reach your doctor on Friday night? Instead, you contacted one online. If you needed prescriptions like insulin or heart medications, they could prescribe and deliver it.

But if you thought you had coronavirus?

You would be sent to a fever clinic. They would take your temperature, your symptoms, medical history, ask where you’d traveled, your contact with anyone infected. They’d whip you through a CT scan …

The point of these “fever clinics” (发热门诊), as distinguished from ordinary hospitals, was to give anyone who thought they might be even a little sick² a way to get tested and, more importantly, control the spread by isolating even asymptomatic carriers away from their family and co-workers and give them a place to wait it out. Some of these had been established for this reason on a permanent basis during the SARS outbreak in 2003, while others were established only recently.

As the country mobilized, all of the major apps promoted features that clearly listed the hospitals that were handling Coronavirus. This included all the fever clinics that had sprung up as well as normal, pre-existing hospitals with ICUs that had been specially designated for handling serious cases of coronavirus (定点收治医院):

The other aspect Aylward mentions is the use of online consultations. Changes in regulations in the past few years have resulted in an explosion of telemedicine apps in China with plays by tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba, traditional companies like Ping An, and existing online medical information resource sites like Dingxiang.

These apps combine a bunch of things: simple ecommerce (for medicine and medical devices), lead generation/vertical search for specialists offline, and online consultations with doctors at top hospitals. Doctors giving online consultations can write prescriptions which can then be filled in the app. The consultations can be paid for a-la-carte or with an annual plan and are sometimes a loss-leader for their online pharmacy business. (This episode of the PanDaily podcast offers a good deep dive into the underlying business models.)

This glut of telemedicine apps affected the outbreak by reducing load on hospitals for non-coronavirus matters, as well as being an appealing first step for those who would otherwise fear catching the virus for sure by going to a hospital. During the crisis, these apps competed to launch new features, offered discounts, issued bombastic press releases, and saw huge surges in usage. They were also prominently integrated into major apps as mini-programs and promoted with other coronavirus-related features.

Ping An saw a 10X increase in new user signups and a 9X increase in online consultations during this period. Dingxiang saw a 2X increase in consultations. According to them, these consultations largely were around whether the patient’s symptoms indicated coronavirus, whether they were wearing their mask correctly, and common concerns like rashes, common colds, infected wounds, allergies, and pinkeye.

Health QR Codes: from Hangzhou to every zhou

The most aggressive action taken early on in China’s management of the crisis was the full lockdown of Wuhan and other cities in Hubei. But across the rest of the country, as in the US, individual provinces and cities enacted their own measures, juggling both public health and economic needs.

Security guards at offices and apartment complexes came up with their own schemes to compel sick people to quarantine. This involved doing temperature checks and asking people about their health and travel history before being allowed into offices, stores, and public transit. To help with this, the phone companies provided a service to offer proof of travel history（个人行程证明) based on location data, in case it was called into question during the grilling.

Some particularly zealous communities created group chats with every resident and asked everyone to report their health each day (which is, um, the kind of personal thing I wouldn’t want to share in a group chat). Many issued paper passes authorizing residents to leave (出入证). Tencent’s community management app Haina offered an electronic version to apartment complexes free to promote the product.

With waning numbers of new cases outside of heavily-locked-down Hubei, there was mounting desire to return to work in many cities. The Hangzhou munincipal government issued guidelines to companies on how to gradually re-open, with different zones of the city on a schedule.

Unlike other cities passing similar policies at the time, they also established a digital platform for reporting workers’ health and gradually whitelisting more enterprises to re-open. Naturally, the system could only be accessed via Alipay and Dingtalk (Alibaba is based in Hangzhou). Central to the system was the notion of a personal health QR code:

To get a code, you fill out a health questionaire (which is linked to your real identity via national ID card). Your code is either red, yellow, or green. If you’re green, you’re admitted, otherwise, you’re refused and reminded to quarantine. The code can be scanned by guards to verify that it is indeed yours.

This was a huge improvement over the then-status-quo of paperwork, passbooks, ID cards, and nosy building managers pestering everyone via WeChat to report their health. The Hangzhou Health Code system received 10M hits on just the first day after launch.

But this new solution came with problems of its own. Some found their codes inexplicably change from green to red during the day, and others found themselves locked out of their apartment complex. Questions mounted: how are children, the elderly, and other people who don’t use Alipay supposed to use this? What about foreigners and people from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan? “Yeah, we know,” the city government replied, “it’s a 1.0. We’re working on it.”

The actual algorithm to decide which risk category one falls into is a topic of speculation, though it seems it was largely a combination of the information in the questionaire, how long someone has waited since getting the code, and the locations the code is later scanned in (along with the public health situation in those locations).

Health QR codes soon swept the country, with other cities and provinces quickly launching their own versions. Alibaba’s tech powered some of these regional systems (they claim 200). Other regions turned to Tencent, who also threw in the ring, eventually launching 300 systems that generated over 1B codes for 800M unique users (go figure). With the handwavy grandiloquence that always seems to accompany enterprise software, Tencent would herald their take on the idea as a “Great Wall of Data” and submit a proposal for ratification as an official industry standard.³

On March 4th, an editorial by Hu Jiefei in Xinhua lamented this fractured state of affairs:

According to incomplete data, there are nearly 100 types of health QR codes issued by provinces and cities nationwide…The launch of health QR codes was aimed at making the resumption of work more precise, scientific, and orderly. But in practice, they’ve actually become a barrier. If you want to make Health QR Codes more effective at this, they need to be smoother in every aspect.

First of all, they need to be able to connect to more types of data. Take, for instance, Shanghai’s “Suishen Ma”: it relies on the Shanghai Big Data Platform, aggregating data from the public health office, police, transportation, and other city departments, as well as telecom, aviation, and railroad data.…

Second, the system needs to interoperate between regions. Public health is a complex system – no region is an island unto itself. With the resumption of work proceeding so quickly, and so many people traveling, the obstacles caused by lack of coordination between regions ought to be considered in making policy.

The good news is that many regions have agreed to recognize Health QR codes from other regions. The Yangtze River Delta, Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei have announced a mutual recognition agreement, as have Zhejiang, Shandong, and Guizhou.

Sure enough, as often happens after an op-ed from the state press agency complains that the national government really ought to get around to doing something about a problem, the national government did something.

On March 20th, the State Council launched its own national health QR code simultaneously on multiple platforms: via their iOS and Android apps, as a WeChat mini-program, and as an Ali mini-program (see sidebar for more on mini-programs). As a 1.0, it still lacks many of the refinements made in the prior month by some of the regional versions.

SIDEBAR: TRACING THE RISE OF MINI-PROGRAMS, QR CODES, AND THEIR IMPACT ON COVID-19

"Mini-programs" have come up a lot in this piece. So what are they?

You can't talk about mini-programs without talking about QR Codes. And you can't talk about QR codes without talking about WeChat.

The early WeChat team, seeing the uses of QR codes emerging in Japan and Taiwan, took a leap of faith and bet heavily on them before anyone else in China, allowing users to generate one for nearly every object in the app: personal accounts, business accounts, group chats, and payments. As QR codes proliferated in the world — shown from phone screens and kiosks, printed on stickers, and in ads in magazines — the usecases for them did too.

By 2014, a new trend emerged. Retail businesses had long promoted their WeChat official accounts in stores for the purpose of being able to send users promotional messages. But many began also linking specially-designed web apps from their accounts that used some then-experimental features in WeChat's in-app browser (via a JS SDK): things like getting a user's identity, initiatings payments, sharing, and accessing other features of the app. This vastly decreased the number of steps users would need to take to get things done compared to ordinary mobile websites.

When combined with QR codes, these webapps enabled new types of interactions that would have previously not been feasible with normal webpages or native apps. Like ordering and paying for food at a restaurant, registering at a hospital, and controlling appliances. They'd linked the offline and online worlds in a new way. When out and about, it became possible to point your phone at a thing and tap directly into whatever software is behind that thing. But in many ways, the entire experience still felt like a bit of a kludge. The team realized there was potential for something more.

So in 2017, WeChat formalized this sort of "single-serving app" by giving them a proper brand name, Mini-Programs (小程序), giving them their own distinctive style of QR code, and making them a first-class kind of entity in the app separate from business profiles. The Mini-Program technology improved on the often-clunky ad-hoc web app UIs developers had come up with by restricting them to a special library of snappy and consistently-designed UI components. And they heavily optimized the performance of these experiences, which would be key if the idea were to catch on in less-developed parts of the country where connections were slower and wallets tighter.

In the year after the launch, the collosal wave of hype surrounding the feature subsided. Mini-programs failed to bequeath riches on first-moving developers, failed to replace mobile apps as we know them, failed to disintermediate app stores, and at just about everything the pundits had breathlessly predicted. But it had succeeded in solidifying and cementing in place this new software form factor. Developers would still need to develop native apps -- but now they'd be dumb to not also develop mini-programs. Mini-programs were here to stay and would accelerate the rate software ate the world — or, at any rate, ate China.

Every tech company realized the need to compete with their own mini-program platforms and somehow find some way to earn the hearts and minds of developers. For Alibaba, their version of mini-programs was a logical value add for payment processing and ecommerce. For Baidu's version — which they call smart mini-programs (智能小程序) to distinguish from the normal, dumb ones — it's a clear way to improve search results by letting users seamlessly jump directly into performing tasks. As for ByteDance's version and the phone consortium that also threw in, the strategy is less clear. Maybe they saw everyone else and thought "hey, why not?"

These platforms evolved bit by bit. WeChat's Mini-Programs, in trying to keep true to its founders vision, had initially stalwartly eschewed any way to find them other than scanning a QR code in the real world (even going so far as to literally block scanning one from a screenshot). This stance softened, as they added numerous new entry points and discovery surfaces throughout the app. A new front emerged, too, in the mini-program wars: enterprise mini-programs. Now developers could tap into China's growing B2B market by offering their mini-programs within apps like WeChat for Work and Dingtalk.

Fast forward to 2020. Initially, the major tech companies were quick to donate funds to charity to help the country combat the epidemic. Later, during a press conference, Chen Yueliang, an official from the Ministry of Civil Affairs asked tech companies "Can't you develop some kind of new software to help society fight this epidemic? That would be way more useful than the 1 billion yuan you've donated."

Thus emerged the flurry of first-party features discussed above (which were largely developed as Mini-Programs), as well as significant efforts to empower independent third-party developers in the fight. Alibaba issued a call to action to developers to make mini-programs (on their platform, of course) to combat the epidemic, giving them free services and publicity. Tencent announced a similar program, funding 41 developers to make anti-epidemic mini-programs to the tune of $28 million.

One early mini-program success story came from Hong Junyao, an independent developer who created "Epidemic Situation" (疫况). It scraped reports from clunky munincipal websites and put confirmed cases on a map. As the first mini-program of its kind, it exploded, with 3 million hits in the first two days. As server costs rose, he found companies to donate cloud capacity and funds to keep it running.

During the coronavirus epidemic, as Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and Bytedance frantically launched features, wooed users and developers, and lobbied governments, all of these parties were unwitting pawns in the platform war now playing out between the tech giants.

We Can Do More: Apps and Pixel Power

To flatten the curve of armchair epidimiology, I should recognize, as a tech guy, I’m clearly not qualified to speculate as to which country’s systems better handled this epidemic. Much is still unknown about the virus itself, the numbers behind it. And political intrigue still abounds in the halls of the White House, Zhonghanhai, and the WHO.

But as someone who’s built apps in both countries, and viewing this crisis narrowly through the lens of apps, there’s no contest⁴. I mean, really. What has Silicon Valley done so far? We’ve added some PSAs to our apps with links to the CDC and WHO, throw in some news and some cutesy clipart:

And remember the other week? When Trump triumphantly announced that Google would have an app to direct people to testing centers by the following week, and they had to clarify: “Well, it’s really a subsidary of ours, and it’s a beta, for some areas, and not for a while.” Come on. This is our response?

Should the American tech industry try to launch solutions more like the ones in China? Wouldn’t it be cool if these UIs in our apps had a kajillion buttons with stuff you can actually do about the coronavirus?

No, that sort of thinking never works. We’ve got completely different problems in the US, which need different solutions. The most pressing ones seem to be that community spread is still rampant in states that haven’t closed schools or issued curfews, people don’t want to or aren’t able to wear masks, and there still aren’t enough tests. These are largely political problems, not really ones that can be addressed through apps. So for tech to help, we might need to get political.

By now, we’ve heard complaints from every side about the “politicization” of the epidemic. Yet we’ve heard leaders around the world compare it to a war, and wars are anything if not political. You can’t talk about something this big without bumping into its politics.

Similarly, recent events seen through the lens of apps show that we can no longer talk about software without talking about politics. (I’ve never gone into it before in all my posts on software design in China because there was always plenty to talk about without it).

Historial events have been inextricably tied to the medium the public experiences them through – whether that be newsreels and photos in the world wars, the election of 1960 through the first televised debates, or the Gulf War as experienced in the then-new 24-hour TV news cycle. This moment in history is one that will be linked in our memories to our phones and our apps, if only for no other reason than because we’re all stuck in our homes with nothing to do but twitch and check our apps. Apps have an untapped political power.

Chinese apps haven’t been quite as shy about using this power. For one thing, look at the language used in these UIs:

Well, the word choice is certainly very…collectivist. They’re also, what we’d call in America, fightin’ words. By comparison, the content Google shows is afraid to recommend sheltering in place or wearing masks for fear of offending.

Consider, too, how apps have treated the statistics around the epidemic. Yes, there’s some doubt in these figures. But there’s no denying Chinese apps have made deliberate design choices in making statistics front-and-center, and in selecting the specific breakdowns displayed⁵. The recent change in these UIs to separately break out the number of domestic cases imported from abroad is propogandistic. It supports the narrative, correct or not, that China’s largely cracked this thing and it’s those pesky foreigners who are bringing it back in.

At just about every juncture, the politics of this story played out through China’s apps. When the government built two temporary hospitals in Wuhan, they hammed it up by offering 24/7 livestreams of construction. 40 million extremely bored people tuned in and ended up giving nicknames to the forklifts⁶. When profuse outrage over Dr. Li Wenliang’s death on social media proved no match for censors, the state media reacted by memorializing him as a martyr, complete with a series of mobile-optimized, equally meme-worthy images. And most recently, every major app and site changed to a grayscale color palette for a national day of mourning.⁷

American apps should consider making their own similarly opinionated or even propogandistic choices in their product design. But because it’s a free country, it’s really up to them on how to do this.

They could start by putting stats front-and-center on their homepages and highlighting the number of tests performed, which seems to be the piece we’re having trouble with here. Tristan Harris explores this idea further. If someone gets directions to a restaurant or a church, apps could remind them to social distance – despite what some governors might say.

Since the post-2016 “techlash”, tech companies in Silicon Valley have acted with a sometimes suffocating sense of caution and unease about their power in the world. They are extremely careful to not do anything that would set off either party or anyone with ideas about regulation. And they seldom use their pixel real estate towards affecting political change (unless in the rare case where the political action being advocated for is one that benefits them).

Yes, it seems apps these days are afraid of politicians. And you can see how well that’s worked out for us.

If big tech ends up making a real difference in this fight, an unavoidable consequence will be politicans becoming afraid of apps.

Maybe then, the next time something like this comes along, our politicians will do a better job.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Rui Ma, Roger Zurawicki, Tori Zhao, Chongwei Liu, and Alistair Thornton for reviewing drafts of this article.

FOOTNOTES

This article is a great teardown of the data tools released during the epidemic from a product perspective. And if you want to try something like this, there are worse places to start than Tencent’s open source code. ↩
A cultural quirk I never quite understood when I lived in China was how when my friends and colleagues got even the slightest cold, rather than chugging DayQuil and Red Bull as I would, would take an hour off work to see a doctor in person. ↩
The actual proposal submitted to the Shenzhen Standards Promotion Council contains no real, concrete technical detail and is instead a rather vacuous, high level description of the system archicture and usecases. ↩
An essay on Huxiu takes this view a bit further than I would. ↩
This is not necessarily the result of top-down nationalist pressure, as we’re often so quick to assume in any story about China, but self interest as well. Every growth-thirsty product manager in China eager to meet their KPIs, I’m sure, was dying to find a way to shoehorn these stats into their feature to boost engagement. ↩
If this played out in America, “Forky McForklift” would be an inevitability. ↩
Chinese apps are always flamboyantly re-skinning their entire UI for holidays, whether that’s going red for Lunar New Year or going full-on-Geocities for Christmas. So I suppose this is the least they could do. ↩

A Sanity Test For Large Groups of PMs

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 05:57:40 -0500

At the waning of the dot com boom, Joel Spolsky wrote a great list of best practices for development teams he called the “Joel Test”. It ended up covering things like using version control and automated builds, which were not as common in those Wild West days:

A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.

Once software began “eating the world”, the engineering teams that sprouted up in every company pretty much learned what worked and the things in Joel’s list became taken for granted.

Today, the profession of software product management is undergoing similar growing pains. It’s just taken us longer to notice — probably because engineers typically outnumber PMs ten to one. Having dozens or even hundreds of PMs on a single app would have sounded silly ten years ago. But now it’s common.

As the profession has risen to prominence — some say even replacing investment banking as the go-to prestigious job for new grads — its reputation has sunk with the people actually building the products. Take this complaint from a Google engineer:

The PM’s that I have had occasion to work with have demonstrated an inability to do even the basic tenets of the position. They exhibit no ability to write even the most basic of product requirement documents, have no concept of ownership as it applies to being at meetings, discussions, reviews – unless it’s a management review.

While there’s plenty to be said about how to build great products or even be effective individually as a PM, this isn’t enough.

At several points in my career when I’ve worked on products big enough to have “teams of teams”, I’ve found that the culture and process of the PM group is as important as anything an individual PM does. Dysfunction at this level wastes not just PMs’ time but the time of all the people on their team who depend on them.

I started formulating a mental checklist that I run through when considering joining a large group of PMs on a mature product to see if they have it together. I thought it’d be fun to formalize it in the same manner as Joel’s list for engineering teams. Here goes!

MY LIST

Frameworks: Can everyone articulate the way the org makes decisions?
Product Reviews: Are pre-reads sent for reviews, and does anybody actually do the pre-reading?
External Frame of Reference: Does the team have a regular outlet to talk to customers/partners/stakeholders?
Turnover: Is the tenure of people in the PM organization commensurate with the complexity of the problem domain and the timescale of the strategy being executed?
Delegation of Execution: Can PMs get space to work on strategy when needed?
Data: Is data easily accessible to the whole team?
Performance Management: Are managers of PMs thoughtful in their performance reviews?
Diversity: Are any of the other PMs weirdos? Are there non-captive engineers?

1. FRAMEWORKS CAN EVERYONE ARTICULATE THE WAY THE ORG MAKES DECISIONS?

Why it Matters: Product orgs in software companies make decisions in many different ways.

Some are heavily design-driven/vision-driven, where values and principles reign supreme, and are run as a kind of benevolent dictatorship. They require leaps of faith on things that may not be immediately verifiable through metrics.

Some are heavily metrics and KPI driven, rely on lots of experimentation and testing, and make a wide series of bets to see what works.

Where on this spectrum product groups should be is another discussion. And plenty of people have written about the ways teams can confuse the map for the territory. That’s all gravy. The thing you want to make sure of is whether people even have the same map. Frequently, they don’t!

How to Check: Ask people about how the company makes major (above the team level) product decisions and decides how to invest resources. If it sounds like KPIs are king, can every PM tell you exactly how the KPIs of major parts of the business are calculated and the tradeoffs between them (not just the ones for their product)? If it sounds like there is a broader vision or grand strategy that takes a leap of faith, do the PMs really grok it and believe in it? Are you getting similar answers from people?

Another positive sign is whether there are frequent, well-run meetings or written updates where the leads of the organization can candidy impart priorities or discuss major decisions with the PMs (i.e. separate from the general all-hands meetings that tend to be fluff).

2. REVIEWS: ARE PRE-READS SENT FOR REVIEWS, AND IF SO, DOES ANYBODY ACTUALLY DO THE PRE-READING?

Why it Matters: Formal reviews become necessary at some point in an org’s life, so they might as well be productive. They’re the key time to get input from your management on your roadmap and major decisions the team is working through. It requires often distilling complex, non-intuitive facts about the situation into digestible chunks and creating the necessary space for real discussion.

In the lousier orgs I’ve worked in, PMs present info to leadership for the very first time in heavily-rehearsed PowerPoints. This usually doesn’t leave enough time for the group to properly comprehend the context presented before weighing in on the decision. It also handicaps the team: it means you can only work on shallow problems that translate into snappy, charismatically-delivered reviews, like the thick-skinned tomatoes bred to be harvested by mechanical harvesters.

PMs in this situation learn to spend lots of time “pre-flighting” review content by routinely booking a flurry of 1:1s with key people the week before. The goal becomes making sure nothing interesting is debated or surfaced in the review itself. The review becomes a kind of ceremony. This is exhausting and time-wasting for everyone.

The best way to make this work is to bake it into the process for every review: require pre-reads to be sent at least 24 hours in advance, and to schedule time for the people in the meeting to read it and even leave comments (before the presenter arrives). A good review is a discussion where the materials are referenced but not presented. They should feel casual and you should leave with new insights and things to look into.

How to Check: Ask PMs how their last few product reviews with executives went down, and how these things are typically handled. See if pre-reads come up. If the product team has templates for review materials that dictate a certain structure or approach (not just pretty fonts and logos), this also a good sign, because it shows someone has at least thought about it (you can always ditch it if it doesn’t work).

3. EXTERNAL FRAME OF REFERENCE: DOES THE TEAM HAVE A REGULAR OUTLET TO TALK TO CUSTOMERS/USERS/PARTNERS?

Why It Matters: “Get out of the Building” is always a great reminder for companies of any size. It’s pretty much a platitude. But in the big companies that many PMs find themselves in, it’s harder than it sounds!

For one thing, tech company offices – at least the ones in Silicon Valley – are designed like casinos: there are few windows and clocks, they have excellent free food and drinks, they are located on remote reservations with free buses from major urban areas.

Environment aside, there may be also be institutional barriers. One may find interacting with users is bottlenecked through dedicated departments like UX Research or support (who are inevitably short-staffed). There may be some rule that regular employees are not to interact with customers or partners. I’ve seen teams operate a year or more without talking to real users.

Regularly talking to users is important for two reasons:

It disabuses you of whatever internal frame of reference may have contributed to your roadmap decisions (other teams, KPIs, goals, politics, performance reviews) and forces you back into operating with an external frame of reference (that is to say, thinking of your product as something that exists in the real world and has to actually solve peoples’ problems to succeed).
By listening to enough stories, your brain’s natural pattern-matching ability will kick in and reveal things you wouldn’t have known to look for with data alone.

How to Test: Ask PMs and their teams how often they talk to users. Ideally it should be once a week. If they can recall specific conversations or amusing anecdotes, this is good! You can also get a clue from asking PMs “What problem is your team solving?” or “What jobs does your product/feature do and how well?” It’s fine if the answer is framed in both internal terms (business problems) and external terms (user problems), or if they can talk about the tradeoffs between them.

It’s a red flag, though, if people exclusively talk about problems to solve with an internal frame of reference, or if the supposed “people problems” are fake, contrived ones that no human being would say they had. I’ve seen tons of decks with stock photos meant to represent user personas juxtaposed with fake quotes that sound right out of the Coneheads.

4. TURNOVER: IS THE TENURE OF PEOPLE IN THE PRODUCT ORG COMMENSURATE WITH THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM DOMAIN + TIMESCALE OF STRATEGY BEING EXECUTED?

One of the things that took getting used to after moving to product management from engineering is a very different ramp-up period.

As an engineer, it felt like after a month or two internalizing the codebase, the stack, and the dev environment, I was moving at full capacity.

As a product manager, there are parts of the job that come quickly on a new team, but developing deep domain knowledge to the level of being able to produce any real insight that the team finds useful has taken as long as six months.

This all depends, of course, on how quick a study the PM is, how much domain expertise they come in with, how complex the domain really is, and how willing any old-timers are to get them up to speed.

The funny thing I’ve noticed, though, is that in many orgs I’ve worked in, PMs, EMs, and other leaders have a habit of departing just as they finally understand what they’re working on. I’ve even seen teams that are repeatedly spun up to solve the same problem from scratch after a previous one failed.

Institutional knowledge is only as lasting as the people at each level in the institution. Some companies claim they “reward failure” or “take away learnings” from efforts around the company, but this is bogus if nobody is around to remember what happened before them.

How to Check: Ask PMs about the major pivots their team has made (e.g. actual roadmap changes, or changing what they’re building). The given reasons for these should be mostly substantive realizations about the strategy or changes in the market, not reactions to meaningless org chart chaos. Another thing to look for is various types of “cultural infra” meant to get new people on a team up to speed on a complex domain, like training, videos, and wikis.

5. EXECUTION: CAN PMS DELEGATE EXECUTION + SECONDARY RESPONSIBILITIES WHEN NEEDED?

It may come as a surprise to some, but being a “scrum master”, writing progress reports, and making Gannt charts is not the primary responsibility of a PM. It’s one of the myriad tasks one might do in order for the team to be successful, but this can be safely lumped with the numerous “taking out the trash” or “nobody’s job” type tasks PMs end up doing.

The key work of a PM that is definitively their job and no one else’s is the critical synthesis of inputs to produce the strategy and roadmap for their team. Of course, this doesn’t mean being the decision maker; it means helping the team coalesce various inputs into a single coherent vision with some internal logic, rather than a miasma/probability cloud of things people thought would be cool. This is a task that requires actual intellectual rigor and focus (to the same extent that engineering does). This kind of work is never done. There are always more questions to ask, more inputs to get, more developments from competitors and partner teams to understand, and more angles to look at the data through. Then distilling it down to crisp framing that resonates with the team and helps them do their job.

The job you thought: decisions, whiteboarding, presentations

Actual: sitting at your desk at 5:30 and thinking “I can actually do something now”
— PM in Tech (@techpmlife) December 3, 2019

This work is so important that it can’t — as is often the case — be left till the end of a day of harried meetings and errand-running as an afterthought, or done during the weekends. PMs thus have to operate on both a makers’ schedule and a managers schedule. To make the necessary time requires, in some cases, telling members of the team, in as diplomatic terms as possible, that you’re not their goddamn secretary. As Ben Horrowitz wrote in a now classic document:

Good product managers don’t get all of their time sucked up by the various organizations that must work together to deliver right product right time. They don’t take all the product team minutes, they don’t project manage the various functions, they are not gophers for engineering.

It should therefore be permissable, when needed, to shift administrivia and execution work onto other team members. It should be possible to build capacity and make people feel more comfortable with coordinating execution, communicating with other teams, even writing feature specs if necessary.

How to Check: Ask any PMs how they spend their time between strategy and execution. See how deeply they have wrestled with key questions their team has had on their own product.

7. DATA: IS DATA EASILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE WHOLE TEAM?

Product data is too important to be left to the data scientists. Everyone on the team should have basic familiarity with the tables where product data is stored and be able to finagle a LEFT JOIN every once in a while. It ain’t rocket surgery!

This is important to free up your data scientist for the kind of in-depth, hard-hitting analysis that has the potential to inform product direction.

When I arrived at Facebook and attended the “Data Camp” part of orientation, I was so blown away by their approach to empowering every employee to examine product data with their investments in tools, infra, and training that I wondered why any company does it differently.

It’s certainly possible for teams to go too far with data analysis, metrics, and experiments. But there’s no excuse to not to have the tools and infra to let everyone on the team dig through product data on their own when they’re curious about something.

How to Check: Ask what kind of data tools and infra are available, and whether non-DS routinely query data for their product.

8. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: ARE MANAGERS OF PMS THOUGHTFUL IN PERFORMANCE REVIEWS?

If the organization does some kind of “360˚ feedback” as part of performance reviews, PM managers — perhaps moreso than managers of other roles — need to pay particular attention to interpreting it thoughtfully.

For one thing, the PM job by definition entails deciding every day who to disappoint in the name of progress for the team. We can even take on vastly different personas in different meetings: data-driven in one, design-driven in another, opinionated in one, collaboative in another. Sometimes the team needs help framing strategy. Other times, the strategy is fine and the thing the team most needs is someone to run around moving organizational obstacles out of the way.

PMs and their managers should align on an explicit expectation of which things are important and what it’s okay to trade off (or who it’s okay to piss off). Good PMs will have an infinite list of things they want to do to help their team, but don’t have the time to do. So prioritizing, and being aligned on that prioritization with one’s manager, is the only way to attain any semblance of sanity and work-life balance. Good PM managers will be receptive to this discussion, and great PM managers will initiate it.

Far more important than the fairness of the rating¹ in a performance review is whether the written feedback is actually thoughtful and insightful, rather than the typical hodgepodge of indiscriminately regurgitated peer feedback and thought-terminating cliches. As Michael Lopp writes in No Surprises:

A measure doesn’t help you in your career. Your performance review isn’t about comparisons to others. They’re about what you did and what you could do. What you’re looking for is the content.

How to Check: Ask PMs what kind of feedback they got from their past couple managers and whether their managers seemed to take coaching seriously.

9. DIVERSITY: ARE ANY PMS WEIRDOS? ARE THERE NON-CAPTIVE ENGINEERS?

The usual qualifiers of diversity (race, gender, orientation) should go without saying. Without diminishing that, I want to highlight a couple other aspects:

Non-Captive Engineers: Ideally, the organization should not be burning through engineers and treating them as replaceable. There should be enough senior engineers who are happy to stay on, and their situation should be such that, if the product is going in the wrong direction, they can speak up or move on (rather than having to tolerate the product team’s BS). This is, then, a vital feedback loop for ensuring good product management.

This breaks down if most of the engineering team is made up of new grads (they are scared because it’s their first job and busy ramping up on the raw technical component of the job) or H1-B’s (due to the US’s terrible immigration system, they would be deported if they quit or got fired). While new grads and immigrants make wonderful teammates, it is a sign of dysfunction if this is the only kind of engineering talent the team can retain. There should be a few free agents as well!

On Weirdo PMs: This is a personal and unfair bias, but I like working with PMs who went into it through channels other than the official ones, and are motivated out of their passion for building things and solving problems. Not because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to do, or because they think it’s prestigious, or because it is the default path from whatever elite school they went to.² A team of people who are trained box-tickers and track-followers is no fun, and probably doesn’t apply much critical thinking to product problems. If I meet a team, I hope to find a few people even weirder than me.

How to Check: Get to know prospective teammates and gauge diversity of their backgrounds.

CONCLUSION

That’s pretty much my wishlist. It’s worth remembering not every organization is perfect, and it’s possible to fix a lot of these problems through influence. But it’s good to know what you’re dealing with!

If you’ve thought about similar things, I’d love to get your take. Send me an email or slide into my DMs!

FOOTNOTES

Every time I get worked up over my rating, I have to remind myself that the rating was never supposed to be fair anyway. The nature of the process (at least under stack ranking) is to output a normal distribution from inputs that, most likely, were not originally normally distributed. Losses and gains from individual teams are socialized – that’s just the deal. ↩
I’m aware that being able to enter the tech industry without the “right” education or qualifications is, of course, its own form of privilege. My ability to somehow be employable by big tech companies as a product manager after a life of doing one dumb Homer Simpson-esque thing after another is probably benefited by having been a white, middle-class, male with savings and no dependents. ↩

Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 06:57:40 -0400

TRANSLATIONS: 中文 (品玩)

Lately, everyone’s talking about “conversational UI.” It’s the next big thing. But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It’s taken me so long to figure out why!

Conversations, writes WIRED, can do things traditional GUIs can’t. Matt Hartman equates the surge in text-driven apps as a kind of “hidden homescreen”. TechCrunch says “forget apps, now bots take over”. The creator of Fin thinks it’s a new paradigm all apps will move to. Dharmesh Shah wonders whether the rise of conversational UI will be the downfall of designers. Design, says Emmet Connolly at Intercom is a conversation.

Benedict Evans prophecized that the new lay of the land is “all messaging expands until it includes software.”

“People don’t want apps for every single business that you interact with,” says David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, “…just have a message within a nicely designed bubble … [that’s a] much nicer experience than an app.” Under his charge, Facebook Messenger has tested this approach, building integrations with high profile partners as well as opening up a bot API.

We’ve even seen avant-garde attempts at taking this idea to its extreme, like Quartz’s latest app, which presents the news as a conversation, or the game Lifeline. Apps like Mailtime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them into chats.

Well!

I guess I might be partially to blame for this, with a few pieces citing a section in a 2014 piece of mine that I literally titled “Chats as Universal UI.”

This recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends. One is agent AIs steadily getting better, as evidenced by Siri and Alexa being things people actually use rather than gimmicks. The other is that the the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps. This involves a peculiar fixation on how these apps, particularly WeChat, incorporate all sorts of functionality seemingly unrelated to messaging. They come away surprised by just how many differently-shaped pegs fit into this seemingly oddly-shaped hole. The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party services if they’re presented in a conversational UI instead of a separate native app.

It’s that part which, having spent the past few years working on messaging, seems a major misattribution of what makes messaging apps work and what problems they’re best at solving.

As I’ll explain, messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world. Chat apps have responded by evolving into “meta-platforms.” Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down.

But first, let’s retrace how this state of affairs really came about in the first place.

Note: The opinions expressed here are purely my own and do not reflect that of my employer.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHAT BUBBLE

We’ll begin by taking a closer look at the apparent atomic unit of the “conversational UI”, the message bubble. To do that, we’re going to go back in time a bit. Let’s go back to 2003 or so.

In those days, sending a quick text meant dealing with a UI that looked like this:

In many phone’s UIs, SMSes were treated like mini-emails, often complete with an inbox, outbox, and drafts. So fussy!

Later, some time in the last decade, perhaps owing to a prototype by Jens Alfke, our IMs began taking on their familiar appearance as cartoon dialog bubbles. When smartphones took off later, it was a natural fit for the system SMS apps on the first versions of iOS and Android.

Soon after smartphones launched, those default SMS apps were eclipsed instantly by third-party messaging apps emerging in Europe and Asia (in the US, we have somehow still clung to SMS). They had started as direct clones of the system SMS apps — the only difference being that messages were counted against one’s data quota instead of the stingy and arbitrary SMS allotment given by carriers.

These apps that came along initially to replace SMS have styled the message bubble every way imaginable: round and square, flat and puffy, green and blue. Free from the constraints of a 20-year-old protocol, these apps evolved, taking on more features. The bubbles displayed in these apps developed a number of affordances for new features like read receipts, names in group chats, and more. New kinds of bubbles emerged to accommodate new types of content these apps supported:

The app I’ve been working on really takes the cake for this. WeChat’s got bubbles for text, voice messages, big videos, l’il “Sight” videos, full-width cards with hero shots for news headlines, bubbles for payments, files, links, locations, and contact cards. Mucking through some code once, I saw definitions for nearly 100 types of supported messages, most I’d never seen in actual use.

Aside from supporting so many different types of messages, another advance WeChat made was realizing a messaging app needed different types of accounts as well. They’d seen brands and celebrities registering personal accounts and making series of giant group chats to invite their fans into. There had to be a better way! Thus was born Official Accounts.

Here’s what one of the first accounts, China Southern Airlines, looked like when the feature launched in 2012:

Yeah…this bot ain’t exactly HAL 9000.

Here’s what the account for my city’s subway system looked like:

Why was the user asked to enter numbers, as if on an IVR system? Were the creators of these accounts so unimaginative to the possibilities of a new medium as to replicate their old-school hotline?

Actually, no! In fact, keywords could be defined, and messages could be even routed through the third party’s server to formulate a response using whatever method it pleases. Yet in this case, entering keywords or more complex queries in Chinese (or god forbid, formulating a complete sentence) would be even worse. At the time, typing in numbers really was the best UI choice given the constraints.

Critically, these experiences were still often preferable to downloading a separate app on a data plan or spotty WiFi connection, or having to call someone’s customer service hotline and wait on hold. The Official Account platform was a rousing success; there are over 8 million of these accounts today. As it took off, the APIs offered to third parties to build their accounts expanded to accommodate a growing array of use cases and demands.

Some of these new APIs deepened and enabled new possibilities within the “conversational” nature of these interactions. Voice messages were transcribed via speech recognition before being sent to the OA’s server. Objects could be recognized in pictures. Advanced natural language processing could even extract named entities and certain types of queries from text sent by users. Users could be patched in to agents at service centers to carry on a conversation exactly as they would with a friend in the app. There was even a special integration whereby I can select a message in a chat and forward it to Evernote’s Official Account (as I would to a friend) to save it to a note. Cute, right?

On the other hand, far greater and more successful were the enhancements made running counter or orthogonal to the idea of conversational UI.

One affordance added right off the bat was the three-tabbed fixed menu. Now accounts could offer fast access to all their features without having to send a prompt or depend on state information. Here’s what the menu looks like today on the Guangzhou Metro’s main official account:

Not only can those tabs send keywords, but they can open up webpages as well. Web apps invoked in this way can identify the user (using OAuth). They even have an extensive JavaScript API at their disposal to integrate with all sorts of features elsewhere in the app, even reacting to Bluetooth beacons.

OAs gained the ability to send and recieve money. The accounts could have QR codes — both for the account itself, as well as parametric ones that can send along extra data (like what product I’ve picked up in a store or what table I’m sitting at). They gained the ability to authenticate me on their owners’ WiFi hotspots (a development that emerged, no doubt, from merchants who had written the welcome message in the OA they made for their shop to tell customers their router’s WiFi password). Official accounts could not only send out headline news to users, but, if they wish, host the linked articles on WeChat itself, letting users add comments and even send cash tips via the app. None of these things have anything at all to do with chat, but they’re darn nifty!

While this craziness was flying around out here, what sort of vision did those disruptors back on the west coast begin conjuring for our future bot overlords? Let’s ponder this example from the homepage of Microsoft’s recently-launched Bot Framework. Here’s how they think we’ll be ordering pizzas in the future:

Good gravy, that’s over 73 taps¹ to tell Pizza Bot what I want. And this is when he already knows me on a first-name basis! I’d hate to see him when he’s just warming up to someone.

Man, counting those taps sure has made me hungry! We haven’t quite got pizza here, but there’s Pizza Hut, which is almost the same. Let me open their official account…

I have, in 16 taps, ordered a pizza. That includes 1 for choosing ‘medium’, 1 for dismissing their coach marks, and 6 for entering my PIN. For some reason, it’s not set up to use my TouchID. Afterwards, Pizza Hut’s account even sent me a special transaction message with a link to let me track it:

Well, it isn’t exactly Ray’s, that’s for sure, but it’s pizza. And I didn’t have to leave my chat app to get it.

The key wins for WeChat in the above interaction (compared to a native app) largely came from steamlining away app installation, login, payment, and notifications, optimizations having nothing to do with the conversational metaphor in its UI. These are the steps that generate the most friction in any mobile experence – native app or not.

It shouldn’t require any detailed analysis, then, to point out the patent inanity of these other recent examples of bots and conversational UI proffered by companies on the vanguard of the trend:

This notion of a bot handling the above sorts of tasks is a curious kind of skeumorphism. In the same way that a contact book app (before the flat UI fashion began) may have presented contacts as little cards with drop shadows and ring holes to suggest a Rolodex, conversational UI, too, has applied an analog metaphor to a digital task and brought along details that, in this form, no longer serve any purpose. Things like the small pleasantries in the above exchange like “please” and “thank you”, to asking for various pizza-related choices sequentially and separately (rather than all at once). These vestiges of human conversation no longer provide utility (if anything, they impede the task). I am no more really holding a conversation than my contact book app really is a l’il Rolodex. At the end, a single call to some ordering interface will be made.

Designing the UI for a given task around a purely conversational metaphor makes us surrender the full gamut of choices we’d otherwise have in representing each facet of the task in the UI and how they are arranged spatially and temporaly. Consider those made in Pizza Hut’s acccount: I can see exactly how many slices a medium is, how much corn is inexplicably sprinkled on top of a “Tianfu Beef” pizza, what address it thinks it’s delivering to, and exactly how much it will cost.

So let’s take these past few years in China as “The Great Conversational UI Experiment.” Here, you have a messaging platform that achieved such total saturation among both users and businesses (to an extent that Facebook, Kik, and Telegram would die for). It boldly and earnestly carried the “make every interaction a conversation” torch as far as it could. It added countless features to its APIs — and yet those that actually succeeded in bringing value to users were the ones that peeled back conventions of “conversational” UI. Most instructively, these successes were borne out of watching how users and brands actually used the app and seeking to optimize those cases.

You can see from Facebook and others’ early forays into bots that they’re already beginning to have the same hunch. Telegram’s take is true to its inspiration in IRC-style slash commands.

To be fair, it’s still surprising the range of apps and services that can be shoehorned into a chat-style UI. No doubt it can be expanded with great AI and little UI affordances here and there.

And sure, performing certain tasks in a chat brings along some useful side-benefits. It can be, compared to apps, a low-bandwidth, snappy, and consistent way to get a task done. I’m even left with a handy, timestamped, offline-viewable record of everything that’s transpired. I can search it and quickly jump to media and links. I can clip parts of it and forward it to friends within the app, or save it to an archive.

By interacting with certain services via a messaging app instead of via independent apps, when things happen that might deserve my attention, the thread gets bumped up in my inbox instead the message getting lost in a sea of push notifications and emails.

And though it’s clear pure “conversational UI” is ultimately a failed conceit, that last piece may be more important than it first seems…

THE INBOX IS THE NEW HOME SCREEN

The inbox is where it’s really at. I am, of course, heavily biased, but I feel WeChat’s is the best in class. I’d even go as far as to say it’s an overlooked piece of genius in the app. Some key improvements (compared to the inboxes we’re used to in email and SMS apps) include:

Stickyability: If I want to stay on top of a particular thread in the inbox (whether it represents a person, a group, an official account, or another feature exposed here), I can “sticky” the thread to the top of the inbox.
Mutability: I can mute notifications from any thread, but it will still pop up in the inbox as any thread does, only with an indeterminate red badge instead of a numbered one.
Killablity: If I don’t want to receive messages from something anymore, it’s two taps to kill it.
Hierarchy: News and promotions can be pushed to me through official accounts, but when they arrive, they just make the “Subscriptions” category pop up and show me the latest headline without interfering with other messages. When a service has a real reason to send me, personally, a message, it can pop out and appear in the main inbox. I find this approach superior to Gmail’s “sidelining” messages into separate inboxes. ²
Status Items: Persistent processes/statuses can be displayed in a special cell at the top. This includes things like being logged into a web/desktop client, using WeChat to authenticate on wifi, playing a song, or migrating data between phones.
Searchability: The search bar on the main screen not only searches my contacts but my groups, chat history, favorited content, articles on the web, my newsfeed, and names of features in the app.

It is telling, then, that in all localizations, the name of the first tab in the app is not “Chats” or “Inbox” (as in other messengers), but rather just the name of the app.³

Indeed, the cornerstone of whole experience is effectively a common, semi-hierarchical stream of messages, notifications, and news with a consistent set of controls for handling them. It’s no stretch to see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric).

When you think about it this way, the things listed there in my inbox don’t need to be conversations per se. But everything there, most abstractly, is something that can send me updates and notifications, will change in position when it does so, retains a read/unread status, and most essentially, allows me, the user, the aforementioned modes of control.

And if we really run with this idea to its extreme, what actually might appear when I tap on a cell in the inbox doesn’t matter — I could see a conversation, a song or video, news headlines, a map showing me my route, a timer, or a sub-group of other such threads. Anything, really. Though I guess it’d be best when it’s at least something dynamic or based on a service (I certainly wouldn’t want to access my calculator or camera this way).

RISE OF THE TORTILLA CHIP APP

This term – “app” – is rather old, yet only entered common parlance with the proliferation of smartphones. This is no coincidence. The app paradigm introduced on smartphone OSes circa 2007 was a radical improvement over what we’d had on the desktop. For the first time, software was easy to install, even easier to delete, and was guaranteed to not totally screw with your system (due to sandboxing/permissions models).

At the time, smartphone apps were envisioned as baby brothers to desktop apps. On iOS, apps like Mail and Calendar were designed to evoke their Mac versions. Apple came out with pocket-sized editions of apps like Pages, GarageBand, and iMovie. For the first few years, setting up an iPhone even required plugging it into a desktop and syncing with that monstrosity known as iTunes.

Though some apps indeed are mini-desktop apps that make full use of the supercomputer I carry in my pocket, well over half fall into another category. These apps are just a vessel for a steady stream of news, notifications, messages, and other timely info ultimately residing in a backend service somewhere. They don’t really do much on their own. It’s much like how a tortilla chip’s main value is not so much in its appeal as a chip but as a cheese and chili delivery mechanism.

The smartphone OS we use are still largely based on the assumption of my phone being a mini-desktop, rather than, well, an information nacho, if you will. Consequently, if you’re making one of these apps, your app must give me something new daily (or more), or else it has no reason to live. Its information would be better shown to me via another app I do check often, like a social news feed or a messaging app. The only recourse the OS affords these apps in avoiding such a fate is the rather blunt instrument of push notifications (and things like Today widgets or Android home screen gadgets).⁴

THE OTHER WAYS SMARTPHONE OSES ARE FAILING US

After coming to rely on WeChat in China, it can seem a bit like its own separate environment. After all, within it are not only my chats, but my social news feed, my news and blog subscriptions (many only available via the app), my digital wallet, my reading list. It even directly reads my step count from the various Bluetooth devices my friends and I use. It can scan QR codes, something my OS should do, but doesn’t (more on this later). It can recognize songs being played, even books and other objects from photos. And you can pretty easily sling all types of data between these different areas of the app in ways you’d expect.

Sometimes it reminds me of those awkward transitional days in the early 90’s when one might launch Windows or other shell environments from DOS, then occasionally drop back out to do other stuff. That’s what switching out of WeChat, to my homescreen, and into other apps is slowly heading towards.

It should be no surprise, then, that I say it feels like my OS just isn’t doing much for me lately. How is that? These days, a smartphone OS’s job, aside from the low-level drudgery we take for granted (managing memory and thread pools and the like), is to provide some common infrastructure and higher-level services that apps can rely on. So that apps can focus on doing what they do best. And in this area, it seems OSes are falling short of their potential.

Each item below seems like a petty, inconsequential annoyance — to the point where I feel like some kind of strange, cranky, millenial version of Andy Rooney for even writing it — but they quickly add up!

Notifications — When I glance at my homescreen, there’s red dots splattered everywhere. My eyes dart first towards a few I can interpret. WeChat, naturally, then Mail. My inboxes have 8,108 unread messages, but I surely would notice if it changed to 8,109.

My “Social” folder has 4, one from Facebook which I will check, and three from other stray apps displaying “1”s. I’m not sure what those apps are telling me, or what I’ll need to do after opening the app to clear the dot. I think one might be from when my friend checked me in on Foursquare at a bar a few weeks ago on a trip back to SF, a fact I was aware of because I was standing next to him when he did it, and because the notification already appeared on my phone then. Another might be Instagram, which just throws up a red badge from time to time when it feels lonely. But I mainly know that if my “Social” folder is displaying a 3, there’s probably nothing to see, and a 4 or a 5 may deserve checking.

The system Messages app, which I still keep on my home screen, is showing 39 unreads, mostly one-time-passwords, transaction notifications from my bank, and spam. Messages, for most here, serves no other purpose. My “News” folder displays the sum of a few apps that are trying to tell me something. Airpocalypse is displaying the current AQI of 93 for Guangzhou in its badge.

Starbucks has a ‘1’. What’s that? Have I got a free coffee credit to redeem? Possibly a scone? Let’s see. No, it’s an unread message within the app’s own inbox saying “Welcome to the Starbucks App!” from 43 days ago. Christ on a crutch.

Even worse than those notifications gazing at me longingly from my homescreen are those that interrupt me. When I install a new app, I’m usually prompted right-off-the-bat to enable notifications for it. I’m taking a risk in doing so, not knowing how often or for what they’ll be sent. When I’m interrupted by a superflous notification on my iPhone (or worse, on my Apple Watch), there’s no quick way to tell it “Shut up, and never bother me with this sort of thing again.” I must fish through Settings, find the app, and tweak it there. It is often easier to delete the app entirely. MIUI and some other flavors of Android at least allow me to mute a given app’s notifications right after seeing one. Many apps offer settings to specifiy what sort of things merit notifications, but they’re often located in different places and not worth the trouble.

On iOS, if I miss a critical notification on the lock screen because I actually wanted to unlock my phone to make a call or look something up, until recently, there was no way to quickly go back and find what it was. iOS 9’s notifications drawer, like Android’s, now defaults to sorting notifications reverse-chronologically, instead of grouped by app — an advance five years in the making.

Lastly, things become even more clunky across multiple devices. When I get home from work and crack open my personal laptop, I am notified a second time of all the Facebook messages I recieved during the past couple days, all of the LinkedIn invitations I already saw (because they sent me an email and another push on my phone), and all of my friends’ birthdays.

QR Codes — When I left the US, QR codes were a joke. Printing them on things was a way to tell people you’re a douche, like using lots of hashtags or wearing a Bluetooth headset. They were once this way in China, too, until WeChat doubled down on them. Now, they’re used for people, group chats, brands, payments, login, and more. They’re in plenty of other apps as well. In a place where everyone has adopted them and knows how to scan them, they’ve become a wonderful, fast way to link the offline and online worlds that saves untold amounts of time. But they have a few downsides. One is that they look like robot barf. The other is that, at least here, if you scan a code in the wrong app, you’ll get a webpage telling you to go install the right app, if not something totally inscrutable. Something that was once defined as an open standard is now non-inoperable. I predict great things for Facebook and Snapchat’s de-uglified take on QR codes. Still, I wish my phone’s OS could scan any such code (or detect them in photos) and do the right thing, but it seems the window of opportunity has passed for this.

App Distribution — Aside from the obvious gripes — the app store’s poor discovery mechanisms and inconsistent approval process — I’d written an aside in my last piece about the ways iOS’s App Store misses the mark in China. In short, it’s dog slow and doesn’t support QR codes (which appear in every app advertisement here).

Apps Are Too Big — Not to mention, apps are just too darn big these days. Twitter, an app that displays 140 character messages, weighs in at 72 MB. Bigger apps are less likely to be downloaded on data plans, or even on bad wifi connections. And much more likely to be deleted, forcing users to go through the setup process again every time they re-install them. Apple’s tried to solve this problem via app thinning and on-demand resources, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference yet. David Smith astutely summed up the issue in his post “16GB is a bad experience”, and, I would add, this experience is one disproportionately had by mobile users in the developing world.

Contacts & Social Graph — The idea behind the Contacts app (beyond giving me a way to tag phone numbers with names) is to act as a central repository where a single entry for a person can be linked to every kind of phone number, address, or ID I know for them. iOS’s version has roots in the Address Book in OS X and NeXTStep. In theory, I should be able invoke it in an app to store or retrieve a person’s info for the task at hand, rather than maintaining the same contacts in a bunch of separate app-specific databases. In practice, well, it doesn’t really work that way. The concept of a person as they exist in Facebook or WeChat is rather disjointed from their profile elsewhere.

Not only this, but adding people could be far better. Something clicked in my mind the first time I met a cute girl and she asked to scan my QR code (rather than type in my phone number or search for me on Facebook). Once I got in the habit of adding just-met friends and colleagues via QR code (or Bluetooth) I never wanted to add someone any other way. Why can’t I pull out my phone and, with a swipe from the lock screen, add someone I’ve just met to my phone’s contacts, with whatever phone numbers, websites, or messaging app usernames they’ve chosen to expose to me?

Connectivity — I wrote before about how apps here get around people’s reluctance to use their data plans. I’d mentioned WeChat, Alipay, and Xiaomi’s attempts to make their WiFi-dependant users’ lives easier. This is as big a problem in China as it is in many other developing countries. It’s an issue the OS could address more directly, whether it’s improving the process for authenticating on public hotspots or giving me better ways to monitor my usage.

Authentication — When I open most apps for the first time, they either make me sign up for a new account with my email, use Facebook or other third-party services to log in, or, as is increasingly common, use my phone number to send me a one-time password. These are super clunky. Apps should be already logged in the first time I open them. There should be some flexible concept of identity that the OS can provide to apps immediately without asking, and then, with permission, supplement with further details. If users must switch identities, maybe a Mozilla Persona-like system could be adopted. Anything would be better than the mess that is app login now.

Data Interop — My apps are terrible at sharing data. Lots of friends send me screenshots of articles, chats, tweets, even other apps as a way to share the underlying information. It’s particularly annoying when compression artifacts make the text illegible or I want to go read the rest of the article or engage with the thing in the screenshot somehow. If I open a page in Facebook and want to share it in Twitter, I have to choose “Open in Safari”, re-load the page, and do it from there (though Facebook clearly knows exactly what they’re doing in that instance.) I wish the data in my apps was more atomic and could be freely shared, persisted offline, and searched in a consistent way. But this sort of thing has been a pipe dream since OpenDoc and OLE, so maybe it’s just one of those things you should never do.

Offline Storage & Storage Management — As a consequence of people being so reluctant to use their data plans, apps here are big on offline storage. All the music and movie apps do it, as do news apps and the third-party browsers popular here. Some give users detailed interfaces to manage their storage, even showing little pie graphs. I like this level of control, and I wish all my apps had it. I’d prefer not to think about storage, but if I have to clear data, I’d rather do it from a central UI rather than going into each individual app to manage the things it has saved (or deleting the app out of frustration).

Payments — I wrote before about how nifty online payments are in China. Any website or app that takes my money pretty much uses Alipay or WeChat Wallet. In the US, I have to type in and update credit card and address info for every new app I install. We have OS-provided solutions in Apple Pay and Android Pay, but these seem to be accepted in few places and strictly NFC-based, limiting potential network effects. The nice thing about the solutions here is just how many combinations of scenarios and hardware they’ve covered, whether it’s expensive POS equipment that just requires me to hold my phone up, to scanning a pre-generated QR code the merchant has printed on a vinyl mat, to web payments, to 3rd-party app payments, to peer to peer payments between normal users who aren’t connected. Whether you’re an app startup or a mom and pop convenience store, you have no excuse to not accept one of these solutions. And as a user, there’s no place where it’s more frictionless to part with your money. When will blowing my hard-earned dough in US apps be this easy?

THE COMING META-PLATFORM WAR

So the meta-platforms — WeChat, Facebook, LINE, and the like — have come and addressed many of the pain points above. They’ve delivered solutions neither the open web nor those behind the closed app store model were coordinated enough, thoughtful enough, or perhaps incentivized enough to produce.

Originally, the whole tradeoff we were promised with locked-down devices and app stores was that things were much nicer inside the “walled garden.” But over the years, as so many weeds sprung there, others came and built another wall with another garden inside of it, with yet another gatekeeper to deal with.

In the 1990’s, OS makers shook in their boots over the prospect of web browsers disintermediating them, but somehow it’s taken more than another decade for the next challenger to emerge in the peculiar form of messaging apps. And though they’re still quite far from wholly replacing the high-level features OS offer to users and app developers, we can clearly see the beginning of this encroachment.

So here we are. What do we do?

A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION

I don’t know about you, but here’s what I want to see happen.

I want the first tab of my OS’s home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app’s inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I’ll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I’ll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos.

The next time I’m back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday’s⁴ and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight.

As a user, I want my apps — whether they’re native or web-based pseudo-apps — to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles.

I don’t actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these problems for me by bolting solutions onto their messaging products. Hell, maybe Chrome or UC Browser will do it. Or maybe it’ll be delivered in some magic, blockchain-distributed, GNU-licensed, neckbeard-encrusted solution that the masses, in a sudden epiphany, repent to.

But more than anything, rather than screwing around with bots, I want the tech industry to focus on solving these major annoyances and handling some of the common use cases I described that my phone ought to do better with by now.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Kevin Shimota, Jeff Dlouhy, Andrew Badr, Jon Russel, Muzzammil Zaveri, Sonya Mann, Stephen Wang, Hank Horkoff, Mark Evans, Michael Belfrage, and Jake Rozin for reviewing drafts of this essay.

FOOTNOTES

One might object to the tap-counting approach above with “but what about speech recognition? Why can’t it be like Jarvis in Iron Man?” First, you are not Tony Stark. Second, speech recognition UIs are only economical for a given task when describing the task orally is faster than the equivalent tapping. I’ve only ever had one use-case for Siri: when I’m leaving the laundromat and tell her “Set a timer for 35 minutes” so that I can come back to put my clothes in the dryer. That is to say, it takes longer to set a timer than it takes to utter the words “set a timer.” Performing complex, multi-choice tasks like ordering a pizza with only a speech UI would take several multiples of the time it takes to do them using a well-optimized conventional UI as we’ve seen above (particularly if I’m waiting for a synthesized voice to rattle off the response each time). In conversations longer than a single commmand, using such UIs can feel less like being Iron Man and more like speaking to the sloths in Zootopia. The only case I see them being useful is when I’m not able to use my hands. ↩
I’ve been wanting to pitch a feature that lets users to put any thread into folders. This would let users tame their growing number of group chats, decide which ones should have priority in their stream, as well as make it harder to lose track of them. I fear it would be too complex though. ↩
Since publishing this article, WeChat’s English localization has reverted its inbox tab to say “Chats”, while in Chinese, it remains the name of the app. ↩
There are actually a few decent choices for presenting timely info snippets from disparate sources/apps. You could choose a conventional inbox, a modern chat app-style inbox as described here, dashboard widgets/tiles (as in Windows’ Metro-style UI), Facebook-style filtered newsfeeds, unfiltered Twitter-style feeds, or Google Now-style cards. But I think the chat-style inbox as detailed here is the most versatile. ↩ ↩²

More Chinese Mobile UI Trends

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:00:40 -0500

TRANSLATIONS: 中文 (36氪) | 中文 (虎嗅)

At the end of 2014, I wrote about the trends I noticed in UI design in apps in China. It was a surprising hit, receiving hundreds of thousands unique views the following week, and multiple translations into Chinese as well as Russian and Korean.

I’m not sure why it struck a nerve. To my buddies back in SF who thought I was nuts for shipping out here, maybe it was interesting to see how software makers in China are far from being mere hawkers of pale, tasteless knockoffs forced onto the unsuspecting public living behind the Firewall. Rather, it’s a vibrant, thriving scene here, filled with talented people whose work reflects a different set of ideas, priorities, and sensibilities.

To others, perhaps another angle was trying to use a society’s software as window into its values and culture — something few other countries’ domestic software output is voluminous enough to enable.

As to the surprising number of people in the Chinese blogosphere that translated, reposted, and analyzed it, I guess the appeal was that no outsider had ever before really looked at the design of apps here as being that different at all.

This being 2016, the year of the Monkey, it’s about time for a new installment. I’ll start with some more tidbits on app design here that I hadn’t noticed when I wrote the last article, then move on to some new developments in the mobile world since then.

Things I Hadn’t Noticed Before

USER RANKS

Long a feature of the PhpBB-style forums of my youth, then promptly dispensed with once the “social web” properly took off in the mid-aughts, user ranks are quite common in Chinese apps. In social apps, they’re a 等级 (děngjí, grade) while in e-commerce apps, they’re points 积分 (jīfēn, points). They’re denoted next to one’s profile name as a series of badges, or as a special border on one’s avatar. Often starting a “VIP” membership in a premium app will add a special icon next to your name.

I’m told QQ was the first to do this, basing their rank system on hours connected. People once left their desktop PCs running to rack up the hours, until a daily cap was added.

I don’t really use QQ much, but my profile has more medals than a NATO general’s uniform. Weibo says I’m a level 9; maybe at 10, I can finally cast “magic missile.”

THE “BULLET CURTAIN”

Originating from Japan, many Chinese video sites and apps have a button that displays users’ comments chaotically scrolling marquee-style over the video. This is called 弹幕 (dàn mù).

SOME ICONS I’VE ONLY SEEN HERE

I’d mentioned before that tons of apps offer theme options. I hadn’t noticed then that most had settled on the same, curious icon to represent this: a T-shirt. I guess it makes sense, it’s like new snazzy new threads for your UI. A few buck this trend by using a paintbrush icon instead.

Another funny one is the “happy shopping bag”, used for shopping features¹. Many apps have some kind of store — whether it’s jogging apps selling gear, music apps selling headphones, WeChat and QQ selling you top picks from JD.com, or, well, any product from Xiaomi trying to sell you more Xiaomi products.

KEYBOARDS & RETURN BUTTONS

The iOS SDK allows developers to choose what the button in the lower right of a keyboard does. Is it a gray “return” button that inserts a line break, or is it a bright blue button with an action like “Search” or “Go” or “Send”?

Without looking, if you were designing a messaging app, which would you choose? Is it important to allow the user to insert line breaks for things like lists and multi-paragraph letters (in which case you need to add a custom “send” button somewhere in your UI outside the keyboard), or would you just pop a blue send button on the keyboard? It seems like a clear win for the latter. How often do you really need line breaks when typing an SMS on your phone, right? And wouldn’t users accidentally add a line break when they mean to send the message?

No! Wrong! It turns out when you make that your send button, it’s easy to accidentally hit it while typing a space and send an incomplete message or one with an incorrect autocompleted word. So easy, in fact, that the iOS system Messages app and every Western-produced chat app under the sun has unanimously elected for a custom “send” button outside the keyboard.

Users here do not have this problem, because one does not use the spacebar much when typing Chinese, even between sentences (Chinese punctuation is more prominent and has built-in whitespace). Furthermore, your fingers are often reaching above the keyboard to access Pinyin results, and they’ve got better things to use the screen real estate for. So here, in every chat app, the choice remains clear – just put it in the keyboard!

THIRD-PARTY BROWSERS

Many people opt out of using the stock browsers on their smartphones, instead opting for a third-party browser like UCBrowser, QQ Browser, or Qihoo’s 360 Browser. In fact, according to QuestMobile, QQ Browser is the 5th most popular app on Android, while iOS users prefer UC, which is the 12th most popular there.

These browsers boast plenty of features above the system browser. They have bandwidth-saving and acceleration features, ad-blocking, theming, “night mode”, scanning/creation of QR codes, downloading of pages and videos for offline use, and of course tight integration with Chinese search, news, and social media sites. Many browsers also offer nice UIs for e-books, usable offline.

Though Baidu’s own browser never took off, its widely-installed main app (mainly a fast way to get to their search engine and portal) holds its own as a third-party browser and includes many of the above features when browsing webpages, not to mention mini-versions of many of their other products (takeout ordering, cloud file storage, news, wallet). Often people reach for Baidu instead of the system browser when their impulse is to navigate to a known website.

Things That Happened in 2015

DATA USAGE BEAN-COUNTING + WIFI AUTHENTICATION GETS EASIER

Folks here are conscious about using their mobile data plans. In fact, according to this report, the average monthly data plan usage here is 210MB (compared to 1GB in the US.)

The popular “phone manager” utility apps offered by Tencent and Baidu include features for monitoring and recording your data usage (流量, liúliàng). Many normal apps, too, offer clever ways to lower their data footprint, whether it’s “no picture mode” in news apps and browsers, special data plan offers, or employing special compression.

I mentioned before, too, that most media apps allow downloading content for offline viewing. Thus if I want to binge-watch House of Cards on my next flight home, I can do it with iQIYI, but not Netflix.

Because people don’t want to waste data, when WiFi is available, they’ll quickly switch to it. All restaurants (except for the lowest-end) provide free wifi to their patrons.

Consequently, there are popular apps for unlocking different networks of hotspots, or for sharing passwords for password-protected hotspots. They even help you guess (hint: it’s usually 88888888). Xiaomi wisely turned Chinese users’ WiFi reliance into a selling point. Their OS’s WiFi connection UI includes badges to tell you which hotspots are known good, free ones, as well as a way to share credentials to a password-protected network with a friend via a QR code. They’ve even got deals with some hotspots to provide free WiFi to people with their hardware.

Open hotspots in public places like malls and coffee shops present the user with a captive portal page — you know, when the first page you access is redirected to some other site. In China, these gateway pages almost always require entering your phone number, solving a CAPTCHA, and finally entering the verification code they sent you via SMS. This is due to a law requiring users to provide some kind of “real identity” to all apps, ISPs, and hotspots. A verified cell phone number (which now requires handing over one’s national ID card to get) is thus the most convenient way to do this. I assume it’s so if the Stasi comes to your Starbucks, they can see who’s accessing which cat videos. For hotspot providers, this also lets them keep a handle on people casually leeching their bandwidth.

These pages are inconvenient enough, but when combined with the default behavior on iOS, it’s particularly infuriating. When connecting to a hotspot with a captive portal, iOS will automatically present a sheet with a mini-browser allowing you to complete whatever actions are required to get access. Switching to the Messages app to see the verification code they sent you dismisses the sheet², disconnecting you and requiring you to go back into Settings, re-connect, and finally enter the code. Finally, after verifying, the sheet’s “Done” button is only enabled via a navigation event, which Javascript-driven portal pages fail to trigger. This is endured daily by hundreds of millions of iPhone users in China who just want their darn WiFi.

This year, a much better solution has been invented and already widely adopted. Now WeChat offers an authentication API for hotspots’ captive portal pages (Alipay also has one). At a restaurant, the customer can even bypass the portal page entirely by scanning a QR code that makes their phone auto-connect and authenticate.

For a typical use case, here’s the sticker they put on all the tables at a Korean BBQ place near me:

Adopting this method of authentication (instead of a plain vanilla router with a password) gives the merchant an opportunity to promote their official account, which is a richer, higher-traffic, and altogether less spammy way to reach users with discounts and news. This also has the advantage of limiting access to patrons physically in scanning distance of the code.

Most hotspots set up like this are WeChat-only, though McDonald’s gives you a choice of WeChat, Alipay, or the old-fashioned SMS method.

FUN WITH CAPTCHAS

Lots of things are protected with CAPTCHAs here, usually the normal sort with jumbled numbers, but sometimes they’re different. Occasionally you’ll be asked to enter Chinese characters or strokes.

A photo CAPTCHA on the official rail ticket booking site 12306.cn (think of it as Healthcare.gov for trains) stumped many users with its nonsensical photo-based challenges and became the subject of Photoshop memes.

THE GREAT TAKEOUT WARS

The grandaddy of restaurant-finding apps is Dazhong Dianping, occupying a place similar to Yelp. Yet it seems like every app, no matter its ostensible purpose, has added some sort of “nearby businesses” feature: QQ, Baidu Maps, Momo, Alipay, even Didi Dache. Some have their own take on this feature, others are white-labeled from other apps. Either way, they’ve all decided to present their categories in the exact same way, as two rows of colorful, round pucks with icons on them.

The next step after giving users a fast way to find nearby grub? Make ordering takeout easy!

Aside from Eleme, Meituan, and Dianping, Alibaba and Baidu have also been pushing their own takeout-ordering pretty aggressively. When I walk down the street, I am constantly being handed coupons for ordering takeout via different apps. Some restaurants have had their menus input into the app’s native UIs, while Pizza Hut seems to work in every ordering app using their own UI via a webview.

I like Baidu’s the best, because it has a dorky “status” view showing you updates on your order. I often use it to order from my favorite mala xiang guo hot pot place, or from the local knockoff KFC (which, unlike real KFC, still carries the Mexican Chicken Wrap).

My co-workers like using a service called 连咖啡, available via WeChat, which dispatches a guy to the nearest Starbucks to grab your coffee for you. When I go to Starbucks, I often get stuck behind that guy in line as he rattles off 30 coffee orders from his phone screen and swipes his member card to get the points.

If ordering food weren’t enough, every other kind of service is available via these apps. With one tap, you can summon a maid, a chef, or those big bottles of water for your cooler. I chuckle when I see criticisms of Silicon Valley startups’s lack of ambition tackling problems of sheltered 20-somethings, because China totally has us beat here.

ALIPAY SHAMELESSLY CLONES WECHAT

Here, when making a payment with your phone (on a website or in real life), one has the choice of two main competing “wallets”: Alipay or the Wallet feature in WeChat.

Alipay, strictly built around financial and commerce features, often seems the most straightforward to reach for if you’re buying something at the convenience store or paying the guy who did your drywall. But when it comes to “social” transactions like paying back friends for things and sending festive red envelopes of cash on the holidays, WeChat is the clear choice. Why use something else when they’re already right there?

This year, both apps have tried to bridge that gulf between their respective use-cases to increase their share of online payments. WeChat added a snappy way to send and receive funds via QR code from the front screen without having to first add the counter-party as a friend (or enter Wallet, in the convenience store scenario).

Alipay, for its move, tried something more ambitious. They copied many of WeChat’s chat features, sticking them in a newly-prominent “Friends” tab. It isn’t as if they decided to take inspiration from WeChat and make their product more social — they literally copied it over. The resemblance is beyond uncanny, most screens being pixel-for-pixel identical. The result is a head-scratching attempt at getting people to use a digital wallet app for chatting with their friends, lest they use a chat app to make their online payments.

Interestingly, amid this wholesale copying, they’ve included a unique take on WeChat’s news feed, here called “生活圈“ (shēnghuó quān, life…circle?). Aside from your friends’ posts, you can watch uninterrupted full-screen video snippets from people around you, which is strangely compelling. The first time I opened it, it was fun to see the insides of all the offices of other companies around me and what people there were doing. After that, interest subsided and nobody has posted anything on it ever.

EVERYONE STARTS SELLING FINANCIAL PRODUCTS

Tencent has been running lots of ads for the re-launch of its financial product marketplace, 理财通 (lǐcái tōng). It’s on the top row of icons in WeChat’s Wallet screen, even above movie tickets and taxi cabs.

One weekend, I just couldn’t escape it. I saw commercials for it before every online video I watched and on the screens in the back of every taxi I rode in. Lest the message not sink in, after the weekend ad blitz, on Monday, these girls posted in front of my office were more than happy to show us how to buy into a fund using the feature:

Indeed, many apps offer 1-click buying of financial products via their wallet features, as do Alipay and the official app from just about any bank. Even Xiaomi ships a “小米金融” app on every device. It’s just a few taps from the main screens of many apps to invest in a fund seemingly yielding upwards of 4% (not long ago, 8%). I see ads for these products everywhere, and they’re always flashy and cartoony rather than trying to seem stodgy and trustworthy like the funds that advertise in the Wall Street Journal.

BOTS

This year, Microsoft China released an AI chatbot called 小冰 (xiǎobīng) that has been popular. She’s accessible via the web, via a standalone app, via WeChat, via Cortana, and through a dedicated button in Xiaomi’s own seldom-used messaging app. It’s fun to toss annoying questions at her and see how she responds. Some people even confide in her. She’s kind of the love child of Siri, ELIZA, and Cleverbot.

A few apps have added bots of their own. The Baidu app has one called 度秘 (dumi, from 秘书, meaning secretary), here represented as an androgynous robot that could be a cousin of Eva from WALL-E. Also available as a stand-alone app, it can answer natural-language search queries, find stuff near you, and tell jokes. It speaks all responses aloud via text-to-speech. Every time you open it, it greets you, instead of just waiting for a query. Though you can type and speak as in a normal chat, they also have a bar at the bottom to expose features and possible responses/follow-ups to something Dumi says.

Inside the Taobao app is 阿里小蜜, (Ali Xiaomi, mi here meaning honey), represented as a cartoon bee. You can install a shortcut on your home screen to go to it directly. It can answer logistics questions about your orders, book travel, and find stuff for you on the site. It cannot tell jokes.

Though bots have been fashionable, I’m not sure there’s evidence that real users actually prefer interacting with apps this way.

THE IOS APP STORE CONTINUES MISSING THE PUCK

This year, a piece of malware called Xcode Ghost infected many popular Chinese apps that had passed Apple’s inspection and been posted on the App Store. It did so via an infected version of Xcode that had been modified to insert the offending malware in every binary it compiled. The infected Xcode had been distributed via Baidu Yunpan, their Dropbox clone.

The reason, of course, that most developers download Xcode from such places is that the official site is really slow. Apple responded by dumping the updates on some CDNs co-located here, but it’s not improved by much.

The App Store is pretty sub-par too, for a few reasons. Not the least of which is that it’s slow all-around, no matter whether you are logged into the US store or the China store. Somehow, it takes about five seconds from tapping the “Search” tab bar icon to the search field actually appearing and becoming usable, which seems like something that shouldn’t be network-bound. Not only is searching by typing keywords something people here do less, but WeChat’s official accounts have already obviated the need for many categories of apps. And when people do install third-party apps, it’s often via QR code, something not supported by the app store or on the OS level.

I’d mentioned in the last post that developers here circumvent the app store on iOS by either having tons of cross-promotion in their own apps, or by actually making their own independent iOS app stores that use OTA certificates to allow installs of non-vetted third-party apps.

In recent iOS updates, Apple made it more complicated for the user to actually authorize these third-party applications. But because the official App Store is so poor, the circumvention has continued un-thwarted. I see lots of links to apps with instructions on how to install this way (like the one for my co-working space).

In fact, just the other day, I was walking down the street and someone handed me this flyer telling me how to enter Settings and trust this certificate so I can play the fish game and win fabulous prizes. What could go wrong?

WECHAT FINALLY BEATS QQ & THE MOBILE FRINGE

In Tencent’s last quarterly statement, WeChat’s monthly active users reached 650 million, surpassing QQ’s 639 million mobile monthly actives. Their total users still beat us, and MAU is not always the most useful metric, but this inflection point happened sooner than anyone had predicted.

Although WeChat has been the darling of the media, it actually has formidable competition in QQ. When it launched as a mobile-only messaging app, it stood in stark contrast to the crusty, still-desktop-centric QQ. The QQ team quickly re-doubled its efforts and successfully pulled off several total redesigns of the app to boost its engagement on mobile devices.

This dynamic is remarkable for two reasons. One is that you’d normally think the younger users would overwhelmingly like the much newer product. But it’s also unusual that a single company could have successfully disrupted itself by creating two, competing, widely-used products in the same category.

As mentioned in a talk by my colleague, there are still hundreds of millions of people who don’t use WeChat. It’s largely younger users and those in more remote parts of the country. Then, of course, there are those who don’t use the Internet at all, or only use it on a desktop. In a country of 1.3 billion, there are only 649 million Internet users, and the actual ratio differs vastly between areas.

I recently traveled to a third-tier city in China’s frigid northeast as part of a team with members responsible for both apps. We were there to conduct some focus groups where we talked to people about how they use their phone, as well as walk around and eat copious amounts of dumplings. I’ve been told there are places here where you buy apps by taking your phone to the village app store and having a guy install it. But going to these sorts of places is more interesting for us because they’re not actually so backwards or remote, yet still quite different from home.

THE WACKY MOBILE FUTURE

Thinking back to when I left San Francisco to move here, my own perspective has shifted. I was afraid that the Bay Area might be the only place I could be happy or do decent work. Aside from my intense longing for burritos, it ended up being a great move. It’s true, there are still some things Silicon Valley is doing well with no contest. Today, China is not yet making the operating systems, frameworks, programming languages, or open standards that the rest of the industry is using.

Yet when I think about it, neither is most of Silicon Valley. As has been ranted about by others, much of the funding and hype back home is all going to people making the exact same sort of consumer apps, gluing together tech to make a buck. Churning out the exact same sort of apps that folks are doing a pretty good job with on this side of the world.

When I’d first moved out and taken a look at mobile design here to write that last piece, it was fun to dive in and chuckle “Hah, some of these apps sure are weird”. It was interesting to see how technology has evolved independently to serve the needs on the ground here.

But it’s about to get a lot weirder. While China is an interesting case, we’ve still got places like India and large parts of Africa that are still far behind. Global internet penetration is still low. And as more people come online in those places, the apps and OSes they use may in no way resemble what we use now. They will look to technology to solve much of the same problems as us while carrying little of the same assumptions.

I can’t wait to see what happens next!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Michael Belfrage, Jeff Dlouhy, and Matt for reading drafts of this post!

FOOTNOTES

I’ve only bought stuff this way a few times, but a given with this sort of feature is that buying an item won’t require yet another login or linking yet another credit card, it will use something like Alipay or WeChat Wallet. It is also worth (perhaps in another post) exploring difference in business models of apps here, to which we can attribute the existence of these features. ↩
If you’re quick, you can catch it in the push notification banner. But for me, I often mute the numbers that send the confirmation codes because they also send spam that I don’t need push notifications about. ↩

Chinese Mobile App UI Trends

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:57:40 -0500

TRANSLATIONS: 中文 (UI.cn) | 中文 (CSDN) | 한국어 | ру́сский язы́к

This summer, I packed up all my things and moved from San Francisco to Guangzhou, China for work. Through an unlikely chain of coincidences that I don’t entirely recall, I’ve become a product manager on WeChat, a popular messaging app in China.

Moving to a new country has meant learning how to do lots of things differently: speaking a new language, eating, shopping, getting around. In a few months, I’m surprised at how acclimated I’ve become to what, at first, seemed such an overwhelmingly alien place.

This has applied to my digital life too. I’ve replaced all my apps with those used here, owning both to my keen interest as someone in the tech industry, and to “go native” to the extent I can. Since then, I’ve similarly become blind to the adaptations required there, too.

One day, for the fun of it, I started writing a list in my notebook of all the things that are different between apps here and those I’m accustomed to using and creating back in the US. When I finished, I was surprised by how long the list was, so it seemed fitting to flesh it out into a post.

Input is Hard
Indeterminate Badges
Walled Gardens, Portals, Platforms
Accounts and Login Screens
Chat as Universal UI
Buying Stuff
Location, Location, Location
Everything Can Be Downloaded
A Word on Moments
Miscellanea
Footnotes

Input Is Hard

PINYIN FUZZY MATCHING

People here use myriad methods of typing Chinese characters: everything from Pinyin, to tracing characters by hand, to a stroke-organized keypad, even one emulating older cell phones’ numeric keypads. The method one prefers seems to depend largely on the era and region one grew up in, though Pinyin seems the most popular.

Yet sites and apps here do not require using of any of these. They’ll happily accept Latin characters as search terms and resolve them to Chinese-language results — independent of your operating system. They even use heuristics to interpret typos and homophones. Once you’re used to it, it’s annoying that the OS and most other apps don’t work this way.

While apps have gone to great lengths to handle all sorts of Chinese input, it’s no surprise that they seldom implement good fuzzy matching for English (e.g. stemming, soundex, gracefully handling diacritical marks, punctuation, and capitalization).

VOICE MESSAGES, VOICE SEARCH, VOICE AGENTS

Why make typing smoother when you can avoid it altogether?

Voice messages in chat apps (particularly WeChat) are popular here. They save the hassle of typing, and can be a godsend for for older generations who have little proficiency with computers, much less any muscle memory for the various methods of inputting Chinese characters.

Personally, I always feel slightly inconvenienced when I receive voice messages, as I must stop what I’m doing to listen (instead of skim over it). I also feel awkward about replying by voice, particularly in public (for fear of being “Bluetooth headset-guy”).

But people here clearly don’t feel the same way, as it’s easy to witness many in public places sending voice messages. The typical pose is holding the phone microphone to the mouth at a slight angle while pressing down on the “record” button with the thumb.

Voice search is also widely supported across apps. In a recent interview, Baidu’s Andrew Ng noted that 10% of their searches were made by voice input.

QR CODES FOR EVERYTHING

Before I shipped out, I conducted user research interviews in San Francisco to gather insight on US users’ habits and preferences. At one point in each interview, I showed the subject a QR code and asked them what it was.

“Isn’t it, like, you take a picture and it brings you to a mystery website?”, scoffed one college girl. Another said they took a photo of one (using the Camera app), to no apparent effect, and never tried it again¹. “I think they’re for coupons or something”, a few surmised, often adding they were a bit afraid of what it might do to their phone. I taped these buffudled reactions to show to my coworkers to further underscore the point that QR codes never took off in the US.²

The Chinese, as you’d guess, are no stranger to them. QR codes are printed on most ads, brochures, restaurant menus, business cards, yes, coupons, and even on the backs of train seats and restroom stall doors:

Most apps have their own QR code reader feature built-in. The codes you find printed on things sometimes only work in one app, so often there will be a row of QR codes for WeChat, Weibo, and other apps. They contain URLs, as one would expect, but not always ones that can deep-link into the app if scanned in an external reader.

As I’ll describe later, these codes are used for everything from, yes, marketing websites, but also for useful things like adding people you meet in real life to your contacts, paying for things, and logging into sites.

Indeterminate Badges

Apps in China liberally employ a UI element best described as the “indeterminate badge”. It’s not possible with native UI controls on iOS, and I’ve seen no US apps use them³.

These are just the standard red badges you’re used to, but with no number. They’re used at every point in an app’s menu hierarchy, cascading, ending with the bottom tabs. If you haven’t opened an app in a little while, you’ll find more than a few screens sequined with these.

Indeterminate badges indicate:

A. New content has been loaded here, somewhere beneath the badged UI element. It indicates that the new items require no action from the user, or that the exact number doesn’t matter. This is used for social media news feeds as well as streams of new items on movie, music, or ecommerce apps

B. A new feature is available. When you find it, it will have a red “NEW”/”新” next to it.

C. The user has turned off or subdued notifications for part of an app. For instance, one can mute a chat in WeChat, which supplants its numbered badge with an indeterminate one when new messages have been sent to the chat. ⁴

Apps employ both numbered and indeterminate badges. If a UI element has children displaying both types, the numbered one takes precedence and gets displayed on the parent.

It strikes me as an invention of necessity, as more complex menu hierarchies require thoughtful means of guiding the user to plunge their depths. It also heightens the addictiveness of many apps, in instances where so many numbered badges would just be too in-your-face.

Fun fact: In QQ, you can drag any numbered badge (but not indeterminate ones) and it’ll come unstuck from its parent UI element and disappear in a little puff of smoke.

Walled Gardens, Portals, Platforms

Richard Gabriel’s The Rise Of “Worse is Better”, now a classic essay, was the first to draw a distinction between two opposing views on software design:

There’s the “Worse is Better” approach exemplified by UNIX and C as developed at Bell Labs. It leans towards collections of small, somewhat crude, interoperable tools. Then there’s the “The Right Thing”/”Better is Better” approach, exemplified by Common Lisp, Scheme, and Emacs as developed at MIT. This approach produces larger, more comprehensive, monolithic solutions to problems.

The latest trend in US apps is splitting apps into “constellations” of ever-more-focused and minimalist task-driven apps, in a nod towards the “worse is better” school. But apps here have been tugged in the opposite direction.

Every app has accumulated more and more features seemingly unrelated to their ostensible purpose — sometimes cleverly integrated, sometimes strapped on arbitrarily — in what I can only imagine are bids to make each app retain eyeballs and work its way into more users’ daily habits.

A few examples that come to mind:

WeChat is the emacs to WhatsApp’s vim. Besides messaging, it does and video calls, has a news feed, a wallet with a payments service, a Favorites feature functioning more like Evernote, a game center (with a built-in game), a location-based people finder, a Shazaam-like song-matching service, and, in accordance with Zawinski’s Law, a mail client⁵. Its official accounts platform (described later) goes as far as providing a layer to allow hardware devices to use the app to communicate with services, instead of requiring custom apps.
Baidu Maps has weather, an optional “Find My Friends” feature, travel guides, a full “wallet” mode for buying all kinds of things. Tencent Maps lets you send audio postcards. Both have QR code readers and obligatory Groupon-style local offers.
Weibo, once a Twitter analog, does much more. Its “post” button actually allows one to post up to 10 distinct types of content, from blog entry to restaurant review. It, too, has grown a wallet feature.
While all-encompassing, Yahoo-like “portal” homepages died in the US sometime in the early 2000’s, they’ve had a long life here in sites like Sina, 163.com, hao123, and Tencent News. Though “normal” apps have all sprouted portal-like features, the actual portal sites all have apps of their own which seem popular enough.

##### “DISCOVER” IS THE NEW HAMBURGER MENU

US apps have standardized on a few ways to group their non-categorizable odds-and-ends (things like settings and help). Often they’re under a “More” tab on the far right (with an elipsis icon), under the dreaded hamburger menu, or, in Facebook’s case, under a “More” tab with a hamburger menu icon.

Chinese apps sometimes do likewise, using “更多” (gèng duō, “even more”). But more often than not, they’re in a second or third bottom tab, emblazoned with “发现” (fāxiàn, “discover”). The Discover menu houses a changing menagerie of fun, not-quite-essential extras that augment the core function of the app. The icon of choice is typically a compass.

#####MANY APP STORES

Lots of apps have a screen promoting other apps to download — typically games, but often other apps as well. Sometimes these screens link to the iOS app store, other times circumventing the app store with an OTA install. Entire third-party app stores using this method are also promoted within some popular apps.

On Android, there are over 10 big app stores, and releasing an app requires listing and updating it on each. Even on iOS, there are alternative stores — I see ads for one called 苹果助手 (Apple Helper), which requires installing a custom provisioning profile to use. Cydia is still popular, too, as jailbroken iPhones abound.

PHONE NUMBERS AND TOKENS OVER PASSWORDS

US sites and apps typically allow two methods of logging in 1) a traditional email and password or 2) third-party authentication through Facebook or Google.

These days, of course, we’re also used to confirming our phone number in messaging apps and in whatever spinoff social app du jour Facebook’s come out with. You key in your number and receive a confirmation code via SMS.

But here, all apps offer this type of phone number registration/login (if not prefer it). This also applies to websites, even those without apps.

QR CODE LOGINS

Many sites also allow users to log in by scanning a QR code in the site’s own app. In the QR code is an expiring session identifier that, once read by the mobile app, associates that browser session with the logged-in account.

This is ideal for situations when you don’t want the user entering their password with an actual keyboard. I’ve been told that in the past, many people used online services on public computers in places like internet cafes which can be plagued with keyloggers and spyware.

##### THIRD PARTY LOGINS

Many apps do also offer third-party authentication through WeChat, QQ, Sina Weibo, or sometimes Renren. On a phone, it’ll switch to the respective app. On websites, you get a choice of either a traditional login or scanning a QR code with the third-party service’s mobile app.

MORE SECURITY MEASURES

Bank sites (as well as Alipay) require a special browser plugin implementing their own password fields. My bank even gave me a USB thumbdrive containing some kind of crypto key. I’m not sure what to do with it, other than hide it.

Often, login screens require completing a CAPTCHA, far more consistently than US apps and sites, which typically only use them on registration forms. Some mobile apps even have them.

Chat as Universal UI

OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS

WeChat has popularized the concept of “official accounts” for brands and public figures. They’re kind of like the IRC and AIM bots of yore — think SmarterChild but for banks, phone companies, blogs, hospitals, malls, and government agencies. Many institutions that otherwise would have native apps or mobile sites have opted instead for official accounts.

You can send any kind of message (text, image, voice, etc), and they’ll reply, either in an automated fashion or by routing it to a human somewhere. The interface is exactly the same as for chatting with your friends, save for one difference: it has menus at the bottom with shortcuts to the main features of the account (though it can be toggled away to reveal the normal text field).

Other than that, every feature you can use in a normal chat is available here. WeChat even auto-transcribes the voice messages (mentioned before) into text before passing them to the third-party server running the account.

Official accounts can also push news updates to their subscribers. Every media outlet operates one, making the screen where these accounts live much akin to an RSS reader for many users.

The success of this model has led to many apps appropriating chat-style UI in different ways. Sina Weibo naturally uses it in their own official accounts feature, and as does QQ. But it can also be found in the “customer support center” area of many other apps). A startup called Grata even sells a white-label version of this that can be dropped into any app.

App makers haven’t just seized upon some insight that a familiar chat-style UI would make sense. They’ve actually copied the entire UI, lock, stock, and barrel, down to the layout of the three-tabbed bottom menu and of the “rich media” news messages pushed to subscribers.

EMOTICONS AND STICKERS

Before the mass-adoption of emojis, the smileys available in most Western apps were direct graphical equivalents of traditional text emoticons, with perhaps 15 or so in common use.

But here, QQ long ago set the standard for graphical emoticons. Its set of 80-someodd icons is wonderfully expressive and versatile, even compared to emojis. The icons in the set range from basic emotions to odder ones like , , and — each one with a fitting time and place!

Any app offering chat features here would be remiss to not copy them, and indeed QQ’s emoticons were carried forward to WeChat and “borrowed” by many, many other apps.

Including larger, animated stickers is also obligatory — though, contrary to my expectations, it doesn’t seem like people in Asia are that more sticker-crazy than people in the US.⁶

Buying Stuff

Online payments in China had a bit of a rocky start due to, well, the complexities of working with Chinese banks. Websites here, instead of just taking a credit card number, require the user to choose their bank from a list of thirty or so, and fill out a form to bind the account. Each bank apparently offers its own unique point of integration that each website must support. This was quickly abstracted into third-party payment solutions like Tenpay and Alipay that were adopted widely by websites here.

SINGLE-SIGN-ON MOBILE PAYMENTS

Now many mobile apps can link with your bank account and be used as an intermediary for other apps, freeing you of going through the onerous binding process in yet another app.

The only time I’ve seen this in a US app was once when I was able to use Venmo to pay for a hotel room on Hotel Tonight. I had been stranded in an airport and was so delighted to see it as an option that I booked the room right then, rather than peruse other options that might require me to enter my credit card information.

But here, this goes without saying. The key difference is that the user doesn’t have to download some weird extra wallet/payments app — the wallets are built into apps they already have.

EVERY APP HAS A WALLET

The management functionality around payments is organized into a central screen, usually called 钱包（qiánbāo， “Wallet”). In addition, these screens have buttons to:

Buy things elsewhere in the app that would naturally come up (e.g. buying an offer in a local offers app).
Buy things in real life by scanning a QR code displayed at the point-of-sale. Or vice versa — you can also have your phone show a QR code which is then read by a camera at the point-of-sale (which is a tad faster).
Send payments to friends, usually called 红包 (hóngbāo, the traditional red envelope used to give gifts of money in China).
Buy things that have nothing to do with anything. For instance, most apps with this feature offer plane tickets, lottery tickets, movie tickets, an Uber-like service to hail cabs (e.g. Dididache), a way to recharge your pre-paid cell phone service, and a way to pay your utility bills. Tencent’s apps have a mini-version of JD.com (a partner e-commerce site), as well as a way to buy QQ币，their virtual currency.

Most of the apps with wallets use very similar layouts with a 3-column grid of colorful icons, typically representing the same collection of functions. Even my actual bank’s app has a screen like this, allowing you to buy things with your balance.

DUDE, TRUST ME, I HAVE A SHIELD, OKAY?

Any app touching money makes enormous pains in promising the security of the transaction. They often have a “security center” screen, which uses a giant shield icon somewhere. US ecommerce sites, of course, did similar things until the early 2000’s (remember “Hacker Safe?”), and today make such promises more subtly.

There are also a few popular apps that are supposed to somehow make your phone run faster, free up memory, make it more secure, and perhaps rid it of snakes. They’re superficially reminiscent of those made for Windows XP at its nadir of malware issues. Of course, this kind of app is useless on your phone, but — just so you know it’s the real deal — they’ve got big shields.

Location, Location, Location

Apps here are never shy about asking for permission to retrieve your location, and they usually find some way to use it when you look hard enough — whether it’s auto-filling a “choose your city” dropdown, showing the weather, or to populate a “local offers” screen.

Many apps also let you connect with strangers nearby, which, here, is not creepy at all. The idea’s been tried in the US with apps like Highlight and Skout, but they have never had the degree of mainstream success that the category has enjoyed here. This could be due to differing cultural attitudes, or a simple function of population density and urbanisation. But it’s a widely-used and widely-implemented idea here.

AS A STANDALONE CATEGORY

Momo, one app expressly built for this purpose, has over 60 million monthly active users and has already filed for IPO. It lets you meet people near you, but also find events, discussions, games, and more. Weiju and Bilin are other contenders in this category.

BUILT INTO EVERYDAY APPS

Aside from the popularity of these standalone apps, more remarkable still is that every normal, seemingly more utilitarian app also includes such features.

WeChat and QQ, the two most popular messaging apps, have a “People Nearby” feature giving you a simple list of people near you, often also letting you browse the photos they have posted to their news feeds. It’s opt-in, of course — you appear on the list of people nearby and are contactable for a couple hours by virtue of looking at the list yourself.⁷

Weibo, unlike Twitter, lets you see posts near you, as well as popular accounts and groups. And the major music, movie, and TV apps even show you what media people near you are watching and listening to.

Also noteworthy is Baidu Maps’ “heatmap”, a live-updated, block-by-block population density map, created by aggregating all the user locations transmitted to the server.

I have the feeling that if mainstream US apps ever added these features — even with a careful and restrained implementation — it’d be instant fodder for scare stories on evening news broadcasts and angry diatribes in the blogosphere by some interest group or another.

Everything Can Be Downloaded

Every app centered around any kind of media allows you to download things for offline consumption. This includes the music apps (QQ Music, Duomi, Baidu Music, etc) and the TV/movie apps (iQIYI, PPTV, Tencent Video, Baidu Video). You’re guaranteed on any subway ride to see at least a dozen people zoned out, catching up on their shows during a commute, something I’d never seen in the US, likely because of users’ ability to download shows here.

Major news apps, too, let you suck down hundreds of articles for later perusal. And every major map app allows you to store offline copies of maps of your city, or even the entire country. The English to Chinese translation apps like Baidu Fanyi and Youdao follow suit, allowing users to download a set of training data for faster (but coarser) offline machine-translations.

Apps that include this functionality highly tout it in their marketing. And when you download a movie or song, you’re usually given a choice of quality setting, and are told exactly how much data and storage is used, down to the KB, in instances where US apps would reduce it to a progress bar or omit it entirely. Often times, they give you a graph of your total disk usage as well.

A Word on Moments

It’s worth breaking from general trends to call special attention to the design of WeChat’s “Moments” or “Friend Circle” feature.

When I first saw it, it seemed as if someone hastily duct-taped an ersatz Facebook news feed to the app and slapped the Picassa icon on it. But as I’ve used it, I’ve found it a surprisingly original and subversive feature. In fact, it’s everything Facebook’s news feed isn’t:

No filtering — Every one of your friends’ posts is here, with no filtering or re-ordering. If one of your friends is annoying, you can take them off the feed, but it’s an all-or-nothing deal.

More intimate — When you like or comment on a friend’s post, only they and any mutual friends can see it – not all of both parties’ friends, as on Facebook. This means that only the author of a post has an accurate idea how many people liked or commented on their post. This lowers’ users inhibitions in engaging with their friends’ posts.

No companies/news — When you follow a company or news site’s official account, they push their updates in a separate area, not on your news feed. Though a friend can re-post content from these accounts to Moments, it takes some deliberate action.

No auto-posts — Third-party apps can post to Moments, but only if the user initiates it, gets switched into WeChat, and manually confirms the post, each time.

No games — Tencent makes boatloads of money off of Zynga-style social media games. However, they’ve had the good sense to relegate this activity to a “Game Center” section of the app that can be safely ignored.

No photo filters - Though many types of content can be posted to Moments, it’s biased towards photos. Moments also actively eschews Instagram-style filters, in an attempt to make posts fast, spontaneous, and raw.

As a result of these design decisions, and the way it’s sewn into the parent app, people here are addicted to checking this feed, more than any other. To switch between messaging to checking the feed, to commenting and engaging, and back is a swift and fluid movement that people perform countless times each day.

Miscellanea

ASSISTIVE TOUCH

Probably half of all iPhone users I see have the “Assistive Touch” option turned on, which makes a floating button appear on your screen at all times. This button, besides being annoying, emulates the hardware “home” button, as well as multitouch gestures for users whose impairments prevent them from performing them.

Nobody can give me a straight answer on why they, a person with two functioning hands and a full complement of motor neurons, enabled this obscure accessibility setting. Answers range from protecting their investment on the phone by not wearing out the physical home button, to it just being fun to play with when you’re bored.

CUTESY MASCOTS

I see a lot of cutesy mascots, often shown in loading and error screens.

POLLUTION WIDGETS

Some apps include quick ways of keeping tabs on local pollution levels.

AD SPLASH SCREENS

Quite a few apps show full-screen ads when you start them. You don’t have to wait for them to load — they’re typically pre-loaded in the background, or even baked into the app. Sometimes they’re for content/items available for purchase inside the app, or for a special event or promotion. Other times they’re unrelated, the same sort of ads you’d see on billboards or on the subway.

THEMING

There’s clearly a trend of major apps offering ways to theme/skin them. I can’t seem to think of a single US app I use on iOS that has this.

ANDROID ROMS

In a place where Google is blocked anyway, people don’t get much value out of the lily-white, unadulterated Google experience that Nexus devices offer, and the stock OS distribution on phones are as terrible here as anywhere. To fill that void, a few alternative Android OS distributions have emerged, including Xiaomi’s MiUI, Alibaba’s YunOS, and Smartisan.

They’re all quite polished and have their share of original UI ideas, but I haven’t had enough time with my Android device to make full notes (perhaps a topic for a future post). I do highly recommend watching Smartisan’s launch event (English subtitles), if only for the entertainment value.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Ray, Andrew, Alex from AppSocial.ly, Zach Xiong, and Andrew Badr for revisions on this post.

FOOTNOTES

After seeing Facebook Rooms’ implementation of QR Codes (wherein the app scans your photos/screenshots upon launch for any QR codes), I suspect they interviewed the same people in studies they conducted. Of course, they could have also asked “If a mobile user encounters a QR code on a page somewhere, what the heck are they supposed to do with it?” ↩
Several friends here have pointed out that QR codes were a joke in China, too, until around 2011. They credit WeChat with legitimizing the concept. ↩
The Twitter app is a notable exception. Showing much restraint, it uses but a single indeterminate badge for the main feed on the first tab. ↩
Many official accounts are restricted to only displaying this type of notification. ↩
QQ Mail users can view their mailbox in the app. ↩
One difference between stickers as realized by Facebook and Path and as by Asian apps like WeChat and LINE is that the latter have user-generated stickers. Stickers can be generated by third-party apps (and in LINE’s case, official accounts), then passed around. Many of the ones I see on WeChat are similar in character to the /r/gifs section of Reddit. ↩
There is a bit of a spam problem, as many of the accounts on the feature are prostitutes and people selling stuff (usually weird cosmetics or vitamins). But it can indeed be used to meet people. And regular folks who wouldn’t install a standalone app for this do check the “nearby” list from time to time, especially when they’re bored. ↩

Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area

Tue, 07 May 2013 04:13:55 -0400

A friend of mine and I made a mashup over the weekend. It shows median incomes along different mass transit routes in the Bay Area (BART, MUNI, CalTrain). Check it out!

UPDATE: Got some play on the New York Times' Bits Blog, KQED, Metafilter, and MUNI Diaries.

Etude in Apple Store Promo

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:13:55 -0500

Apple's Valentines Day promos show Etude running on a white iPad 2!

It's also linked prominently on the iPad site under "From the App Store."

(via benglert)

Etude Acquired by Steinway & Sons

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:14:31 -0400

I'm happy to announce that my iPad music learning startup Etude has been acquired by Steinway & Sons.

When they approached me about the idea of working together, it seemed like an odd idea. What would a piano company in New York want with an iPad app?

It's not the usual acquisition story for a software business, but Steinway is more of a tech company than one might expect. They practically invented the modern piano and have been patenting improvements to it ever since. They're pretty much the Apple of the musical instrument world.

The main reason for acquiring Etude is that Steinway is thinking about how people will learn, perform, and create music in the digital era. Etude is another step in that direction, and I couldn't have wished for a better group of people to work with to continue the app's development.

Which brings me to my next announcement...

INTRODUCING ETUDE 2.0

I'm also announcing the second major release of Etude. It's the first "Steinway-ified" version of the app, but it's way more than a re-branding.

The biggest request from users was for more music. This update brings a brand new music store with thousands of songs to learn, with everything from J.S. Bach to Justin Bieber (yes, it actually has the beibz).

Etude 2 also features a new way for beginners to see music and not to mention tons of little UI improvements that make everything much smoother.

Oh, and it's a free app now! So go get it from the App Store or check out the site to learn more.

SHOUT-OUTS

Etude 1.0 was a long, solo slog, but since coming to Steinway, I've been lucky to be able to bring in and work with with several very talented engineers and designers to build version 2.

Ben Englert and Jon Toohill tackled the technical challenge of sanitizing, converting, and engraving music originally created in other formats. They also helped build the backend for the new store. Kevin Murphy helped with app UI and with QA, noticing bugs that only a cellist would. The incomparable Jesse Benett-Chamberlain designed the new user interface, icon, and site.

Dan Grover

Simulation Games Might Be What The World Needs Now

FOOTNOTES

How Chinese Apps Handled Covid-19

PSAs, Info Centers, and Tools

Getting Care

Health QR Codes: from Hangzhou to every zhou

SIDEBAR: TRACING THE RISE OF MINI-PROGRAMS, QR CODES, AND THEIR IMPACT ON COVID-19

We Can Do More: Apps and Pixel Power

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOOTNOTES

A Sanity Test For Large Groups of PMs

MY LIST

1. FRAMEWORKS CAN EVERYONE ARTICULATE THE WAY THE ORG MAKES DECISIONS?

2. REVIEWS: ARE PRE-READS SENT FOR REVIEWS, AND IF SO, DOES ANYBODY ACTUALLY DO THE PRE-READING?

3. EXTERNAL FRAME OF REFERENCE: DOES THE TEAM HAVE A REGULAR OUTLET TO TALK TO CUSTOMERS/USERS/PARTNERS?

4. TURNOVER: IS THE TENURE OF PEOPLE IN THE PRODUCT ORG COMMENSURATE WITH THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM DOMAIN + TIMESCALE OF STRATEGY BEING EXECUTED?

5. EXECUTION: CAN PMS DELEGATE EXECUTION + SECONDARY RESPONSIBILITIES WHEN NEEDED?

7. DATA: IS DATA EASILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE WHOLE TEAM?

8. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: ARE MANAGERS OF PMS THOUGHTFUL IN PERFORMANCE REVIEWS?

9. DIVERSITY: ARE ANY PMS WEIRDOS? ARE THERE NON-CAPTIVE ENGINEERS?

CONCLUSION

FOOTNOTES

Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHAT BUBBLE

THE INBOX IS THE NEW HOME SCREEN

RISE OF THE TORTILLA CHIP APP

THE OTHER WAYS SMARTPHONE OSES ARE FAILING US

THE COMING META-PLATFORM WAR

A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION

SEE ALSO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOOTNOTES

More Chinese Mobile UI Trends

Things I Hadn’t Noticed Before

USER RANKS

THE “BULLET CURTAIN”

SOME ICONS I’VE ONLY SEEN HERE

KEYBOARDS & RETURN BUTTONS

THIRD-PARTY BROWSERS

Things That Happened in 2015

DATA USAGE BEAN-COUNTING + WIFI AUTHENTICATION GETS EASIER

FUN WITH CAPTCHAS

THE GREAT TAKEOUT WARS

ALIPAY SHAMELESSLY CLONES WECHAT

EVERYONE STARTS SELLING FINANCIAL PRODUCTS

BOTS

THE IOS APP STORE CONTINUES MISSING THE PUCK

WECHAT FINALLY BEATS QQ & THE MOBILE FRINGE

THE WACKY MOBILE FUTURE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOOTNOTES

Chinese Mobile App UI Trends

Table of Contents

Input Is Hard

PINYIN FUZZY MATCHING

VOICE MESSAGES, VOICE SEARCH, VOICE AGENTS

QR CODES FOR EVERYTHING

Indeterminate Badges

Walled Gardens, Portals, Platforms

Accounts and Login Screens

PHONE NUMBERS AND TOKENS OVER PASSWORDS

QR CODE LOGINS

MORE SECURITY MEASURES

Chat as Universal UI

OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS

EMOTICONS AND STICKERS

Buying Stuff

SINGLE-SIGN-ON MOBILE PAYMENTS

EVERY APP HAS A WALLET

DUDE, TRUST ME, I HAVE A SHIELD, OKAY?

Location, Location, Location

AS A STANDALONE CATEGORY

BUILT INTO EVERYDAY APPS

Everything Can Be Downloaded

A Word on Moments

Miscellanea

ASSISTIVE TOUCH

CUTESY MASCOTS

POLLUTION WIDGETS