Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket.
I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority.
But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults.
Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon?
There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds.
We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen.
And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.
For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube:
"We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:
* Cartoons and video games
* Lectures and tutorials
* Other
"
And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms.
Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.
> Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar.
"Simple English" does a pretty good job. Obviously it's a mix of children/public but for science/mathematical topics where I'm looking just to verify my basic understanding of something, swapping over to Simple English usually gives me what I was looking for if the main article is immediately going down into technical rabbit holes.
> here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: [...]
This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and tutorials" bucket?
yeah it was off the cuff. If you ask a 9 year old online if they're an adult, some will say "yes". I mean I guess it's their loss. Maybe a more direct approach is better.
"We've found adults and teens like different parts of youtube and use it differently. We want to make it the best for you. You can switch at any time, but tell us what best describes you:
* I'm an adult
* I'm not an adult.
"
youtube has this "for kids" app which came out after I first started pointing this difference in earnest around 2013, (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) but it's not right and they clearly still cater their main interface to the habits of children who watch the same video hundreds of times - the insane repetition is a part of learning nuance and subtly in the context of content they don't have to actually pay attention to. It's all about learning the meta, super important. They know what happens, it's the silence in between they're excited about - that's the nature of play.
This app instead silos the kids into a playskool interface, great for people under 7 or so, but like our playground reform, we've made it completely unappealing for the 8-22 or so demographic (when I was a kid and there were ziplines into a bank of tires, you bet there were 20 year olds lining up to have a good time on those, we all have a need for play; freedom to err wrapped in relative safety).
Instead, it's data-driven UX for adults and data-driven UX for children - it's about separating the data, not a PTA-acceptable UX for overprotective parents.
The best thing a parent could do is download a set of approved videos and use a local playlist.
The easiest thing to do is just allow them on youtube no filter.
The middle ground is the play app. Weird stuff sometimes get through but usually it's more someone dressed as a pretend princess. The good thing it's never really a murder scene or something equally as horrible (which could popup on youtube.com).
What would you do as a parent?
I would avoid youtube unless you setup the video until 7 or 11. After that it depends on the child.
The one big thing "For Kids" has going for it is the pro-active identity. Rather than feeling like they are missing out by not being an adult, they instead feel like they're picking the thing that's special for them.
> Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.
I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority.
But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults.
Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon?
There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds.
We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen.
And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.
For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:
* Cartoons and video games
* Lectures and tutorials
* Other "
And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms.
Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.