I can see the Google Maps feature as being a problem for people with eating disorders who simply need to drive someplace without being nagged with guilt all the time.
The feature is cool, but it’s a feature that should be opt-in, not automatically there by default.
On some level, you feel guilt because you’re doing bad stuff.
It’s an indication that you should consider changing your behavior.
Or maybe you feel guilt because you’ve been struggling with anorexia for the last decade, are already stick thin, need to be somewhere in 15 minutes, so you choose to drive, but then your favorite mapping app you’ve used for years starts nagging you so you feel hopeless guilt and dread for your entire drive, and then do another 2 hour workout that night just to make yourself feel better even though you’re already malnourished and starving.
Sure, there are psychological problems which an cause you to feel guilt that’s the result of misperceptions of reality, like body dysmorphia.
I’d suggest that most guilt that most people feel, however, is based in reality.
Maybe. But this is why it’s better when product teams are more diverse, and have more diverse experiences to pull from.
When I saw people talk about that Google Maps feature on Twitter I thought it was really cool. I was looking forward to seeing it pop up on my phone.
When I told my wife about it, the first thing she thought was “wow that sucks”. She struggled with eating disorders during high school and through part of college. Most of it because of societal pressures that she as a woman deals with constantly that I don’t.
This dichotomy existed on the twitter post too. Most of the guys responding seemed to think it was really cool. Most of the women responding seemed to think that it being enabled automatically was a terrible idea.
So maybe it’s a cool feature to enable optionally for people who want their mapping app to assist them with their fitness goals. But in retrospect I realized that my personal excitement for the feature was a bit myopic.
Automatically enabled features are generally shit on everything.
For most people they’re thankfully just annoying, but they’re still… annoying.
Where’s my 40 acres and an Armando on the corner?
and now apply that thinking to anything that triggers a negative emotional response from anyone on the planet and then designing your products around not containing any emotional triggers at all. Easy for programmers I’m sure, as they must have covered lots of psychology in their C++ courses and I’ve always found that nerds are such gregarious, empathic, social animals and excellent readers of human nature.
I guess all you do is not to find any emotional responses that trigger white Western millennials, because only they will kick up a fuss on social media. At least that’s easier.
I feel you’ve rather missed the point LMN8R was making. The point isn’t to cater to every single individual, but rather to avoid something offensive/irritating to large groups who don’t happen to be well represented in the heavily white/male software industry.
Clearly you guys meant an Armando in every kitchen. Maybe if America were better fed it wouldn’t be so ornery.
large groups
No. Small, noisy groups.
Designing a map feature around anorexics is ridiculous. Why design anything around people enraged they saw a cupcake emoticon? There’s a big craze for map/GPS/fitness at the moment too and its natural for companies to pursue this market.
There are a huge range of things that can trigger emotional response in anorexics, gamblers,drug or alcohol addicts, people with phobias. all you are doing is putting the onus on a programmer to decide if people with purple phobias are loud enough to trend on socmedia when he picks his colour palette.
I’m pretty sure this entire thread of conversation arises from the fact that Americans are vastly over-fed!
Better fed, not over-fed! Smaller portions of better, diverse food, vs the acres of fried meat slurry they shovel down their gullets, washed down with a pound of liquid sugar!
. . . I want to go to there.
How many cupcakes would I burn walking to the nearest place that serves that?
If Yum! Brands, Inc., McDonald’s Corporation and Restaurant Brands International have done they’re jobs right you should be, at a maximum, only a half a cupcake or less away from refreshment!
30 million estimated Americans with eating disorders + associated friends and family who sympathize with their plight is a small noisy group?
Wow, you think in big terms.
You touch my red meat and my slurry of whatever and I am going to be pissed.
As someone who’s worked in professional software development for over a decade, there is nothing abnormal or wrong about catering to a more inclusive audience.
Whether it’s building features which are accessible to screen readers or braille attachments, or ensuring there is enough contrast in your UI so that color blind users can easily use it, or implementing voice-over features to make touch screen slabs usable by the blind, or enabling you to easily zoom in on anything, or otherwise.
When you build features to be more thoughtful and inclusive, you end up improving your products for everyone, not just the specific people with the most severe disabilities who happen to be most affected by your features.
Inclusivity and thoughtful design can just as easily mean making features opt-in instead of opt-out. If you can easily avoid upsetting people who have medically-classified disabilities with a simple toggle, why not do that?
It reminds me of a game I just completed a few weeks ago - Steamworld Dig 2. At the very beginning of the game it asks you if you’re prone to epilepsy or sensitive to flashing lights, and offers you a toggle right at the beginning to enable/disable certain graphical effects. Sure those people particularly affected might be a tiny percentage, but even I who am not in that group was really appreciative of the option once I got to a sequence which it happened to be referring to.
I read this as “heavy white male software industry”. I am an early prototype.
There’s 30m people triggering off cupcake emoticons? Nah.
Again, why don’t the colour phobic people matter if the cupcake people do? Grayscale for all?
Should we ringfence off the rivers, lakes and oceans in Google maps with warnings because of aquaphobes and those who have lost ones to drowning, surely there are millions affected there?