The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine.
To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work.
Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why.
Emotions are guidance, not binding. If you are not able to manage them on your own (an important aspect of adulthood), they will get into your way at some point in life. Yes, they are real, but acting on your emotions unconditionally is dangerous when you are in a position of responsibility or power.
Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way.
Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it.
Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds.
I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.
I would love to proven wrong but I’m skeptical that a company started 2 years ago with $18 million of Series A VC funding to repay and no shipping product is going to be able to optimize for anything but growth and getting acquired
Related advice for building your professional network over the course of a career: "People won't remember what you said. They might remember what you did. They will remember how you made them feel."
This is what I do (I tend to write software that I like to use). Enjoyment and positive feelings are important components of my work.
But I doubt my stuff would be considered "commercially feasible," and I probably wouldn't get VCs interested.
I don't care. I'm grumpy, battle-scarred, and quite good at what I do. I'm in the enviable position (although I suspect many here would not "envy" me) of not needing to beg others to validate my work (or pay for it), so I'm fairly free to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I have to do. This won't get me fame and riches, but does make me happy.
When optimizing for emotions, we need to be very, very sensitive to our audience. One simple example, is high-key, vs. low-key. High-key stuff is usually against a white background, and low-key stuff is usually against a black background.
White and black trigger all sorts of emotions, and one's culture plays a big part of that (like, black is the sign of mourning, in the US, but white is the sign of mourning, in Japan).
One way that I deal with this, is respecting Dark Mode.
Purple is also another color that can trigger different emotional responses, based on culture (and what it is paired with).
Americans tend to like simple, uncluttered, design-heavy interfaces, while Japanese tend to like busy, colorful interfaces, without as much attention paid to design.
Unfortunately I'm not sure people are even equipped to trust their own feelings anymore. Even in many spaces where people do have agency of how they're designed I've noticed a marked convergence in tastes and preferences over the years. We used to call it "Pinterest aesthetic" and now it's an Instagram or TikTok aesthetic but so many of the choices people make in lighting, styles of furniture, potted plants, and so on themselves feel kind of generic. Often like a cheap imitation of an aesthetic that predominates online. I don't know if this is a consequence of algorithmic recommendations tuning peoples' aesthetic sensibilities all in the same direction or if it's filtering down to the products on offer to where their options are all constrained. But it's depressing nevertheless.
Part of it could just be an age thing. As an elder-millennial I came of age during the peak of vintage/thrifting hipster culture. There was a pretty vibrant spirit of mixing and matching and putting things together from myriad influences before it all got blended into a generic paste of flannel and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.
"Writing manifestos about the state of the industry has never really been our thing." Except, their website feels like a big ol manifesto. And when I read it the first time, I got excited.
But the more I read stuff like this, the more suspicious I get, and I get hit by manifesto fatigue. I want to see the product, and I would love to see something new in the browser world.
The vision is beautiful, and I'm curious to see how that turns into a usable product. I'm pretty sure I don't want my go-to browser to be an artwork or a build-it-yourself type of thing.
Function often comes before the feeling for a reason. A restaurant can't exist without its functionality. That "beloved dish that never fails" is not a feeling but a good product.
I have a strong feeling this will be a very niche product. I would also love to be proven wrong.
I really like this but it's slightly different from how I think. I don't think "quirky" and "unique" are all that essential. We don't fall in love with the tilt of the ceiling fan in the restaurant, we fall in
love with something else, and all the quirky details get a halo from that. The halo is so powerful that bland can become its own kind of beautiful, as the Costco cult demonstrates. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox are nothing but a collage of different shades of gray rectangles and we love them.
I think what really matters is simple and almost tautologically obvious. Just... make your product really good at what it's supposed to be for.
Facebook sucks because it's a social network that isn't designed for people to be social. Chrome was great when it was introduced because it was an internet browser that made browsing the internet extremely fast, easy, and organized (tabs!).
> We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve.
I wonder what that would mean in practice. Optimising for your own feelings is easy, but when you have 100s, let alone millions, of users, what can you possibly know about their feelings? How about conflicting feelings, within the same person, or between different people?
I am very hopeful for this project. I feel like this article perfectly sums up how I feel like software should be and how it should feel to use and also life in general. Software should be a tool to use and enjoy, not something that optimizes to take more of our time.
Optimization has crept into our lives too much. Optimization of decision making that sucks the fun out of everything and makes activities inaccessible to anyone but those who want to optimize for it seems to be the predominant way of thinking. "How to optimize your YouTube channel for view, pick this $1000 bicycle wheel in order to optimize your efficiency by 1%.." I could go on forever. I joined the waitlist and I am excited to see what comes out of this project.
Feelings and emotions relate to values, which are learned at an earlier age, and cannot be easily changed. So yes to this view, but let's understand better what drives it from behind and use it in the overall frame. Are we not at all times optimizing for the values of the perceived majority?
[+] [-] gorjusborg|3 years ago|reply
The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine.
To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work.
Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why.
Trusting our gut is underrated.
[+] [-] blueflow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrysteve|3 years ago|reply
Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way.
Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it.
Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds.
I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.
[+] [-] pketh|3 years ago|reply
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company
[+] [-] scroot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] april_22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
But I doubt my stuff would be considered "commercially feasible," and I probably wouldn't get VCs interested.
I don't care. I'm grumpy, battle-scarred, and quite good at what I do. I'm in the enviable position (although I suspect many here would not "envy" me) of not needing to beg others to validate my work (or pay for it), so I'm fairly free to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I have to do. This won't get me fame and riches, but does make me happy.
When optimizing for emotions, we need to be very, very sensitive to our audience. One simple example, is high-key, vs. low-key. High-key stuff is usually against a white background, and low-key stuff is usually against a black background.
White and black trigger all sorts of emotions, and one's culture plays a big part of that (like, black is the sign of mourning, in the US, but white is the sign of mourning, in Japan).
One way that I deal with this, is respecting Dark Mode.
Purple is also another color that can trigger different emotional responses, based on culture (and what it is paired with).
Americans tend to like simple, uncluttered, design-heavy interfaces, while Japanese tend to like busy, colorful interfaces, without as much attention paid to design.
etc., ad nauseam.
[+] [-] naravara|3 years ago|reply
Part of it could just be an age thing. As an elder-millennial I came of age during the peak of vintage/thrifting hipster culture. There was a pretty vibrant spirit of mixing and matching and putting things together from myriad influences before it all got blended into a generic paste of flannel and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.
[+] [-] jussivee|3 years ago|reply
But the more I read stuff like this, the more suspicious I get, and I get hit by manifesto fatigue. I want to see the product, and I would love to see something new in the browser world.
The vision is beautiful, and I'm curious to see how that turns into a usable product. I'm pretty sure I don't want my go-to browser to be an artwork or a build-it-yourself type of thing.
Function often comes before the feeling for a reason. A restaurant can't exist without its functionality. That "beloved dish that never fails" is not a feeling but a good product.
I have a strong feeling this will be a very niche product. I would also love to be proven wrong.
[+] [-] Vinnl|3 years ago|reply
(And if you're on MacOS, you can actually try it. I haven't.)
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
I think what really matters is simple and almost tautologically obvious. Just... make your product really good at what it's supposed to be for.
Facebook sucks because it's a social network that isn't designed for people to be social. Chrome was great when it was introduced because it was an internet browser that made browsing the internet extremely fast, easy, and organized (tabs!).
[+] [-] Vinnl|3 years ago|reply
I wonder what that would mean in practice. Optimising for your own feelings is easy, but when you have 100s, let alone millions, of users, what can you possibly know about their feelings? How about conflicting feelings, within the same person, or between different people?
[+] [-] protonbob|3 years ago|reply
Optimization has crept into our lives too much. Optimization of decision making that sucks the fun out of everything and makes activities inaccessible to anyone but those who want to optimize for it seems to be the predominant way of thinking. "How to optimize your YouTube channel for view, pick this $1000 bicycle wheel in order to optimize your efficiency by 1%.." I could go on forever. I joined the waitlist and I am excited to see what comes out of this project.
[+] [-] dbgev|3 years ago|reply
That is, optimize for (number of tasks user performs using your software) / (time spent per task)
Actually measurable, too.
[+] [-] umeshunni|3 years ago|reply
When they have too much money and not enough ideas, they end up writing hipster manifestos and end up like Mozilla.
[+] [-] enviclash|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rochak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cy_overlord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonnik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temptemptemp111|3 years ago|reply
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