Skeuomorphic Design and Predictions

A floppy disc to save your drafts. A shelf to access your ebooks. A recycling bin to store your deleted files. These are examples of skeuomorphic design - digital interfaces that mirror their analog counterparts. A helpful way to introduce the new through the familiar.

Skeuomorphic design leverages the past to guide us into the future, but it's doesn't create that future.

If we think skeuomorphicly, we dream narrowly and fall into the classic "faster horse" trap - where the future is only an improved version of now. We predict better horseshoes and saddles, instead of self-driving cars.

Smartphones are not phones with internet, but entertainment consoles and payment systems. Youtube is not home videos online, but a medium for a whole new class of creators.

Amazon started as a bookseller and evolved into the world's biggest cloud provider - an innovation in its own right that spring-boarded countless others.

Innovation by its nature is surprising. It's not a version of now, but something else completely.

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The Art of Giving Feedback

Constructive feedback is an awkward affair. You don't want hurt feelings, but recognize the importance of honesty. You've tried the classic "hoping things will get better on its own" and unfortunately it hasn't played out. When giving feedback, here are a few things that I try to keep it mind. Start with empathy. Step into their shoes and understand their story. If you don't know, ask. Be genuinely curious. Feedback is a dynamic affair. Shared communication with a shared goal towards progress. Take the emotion out of it. Focus on the situation, not the person. Focusing on the person adds unnecessary weight to an already emotionally-bloated event. Be specific. Give clear examples. Vague feedback equals dismissed feedback. Doing above won't de-awkward things fully, but it will dampen it and increase the chance of better outcomes.

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Negative Feedback, Positive Lessons

In the battle against plastic bags, a five-cent tax was shown to be much more successful at deterring usage than a five-cent credit for bringing your own bags. Carrots satisfy but sticks sting, and they sting hard. So we default to the less painful choice of avoiding loss. Loss aversion impacts the way we process information. A 2019 study invited participants to learn through a series of multiple choice questions. Each question only had two options to choose from. Whether guessing correctly or not, they would still learn the right answer. Despite the identical learning opportunity, participants were much more successful at recalling the answers they guessed correctly than those they got wrong. "You're right!" feels good. We savour the moment, analyzing every detail. "You're wrong!" stings. We want to quickly forget, dismiss, and move on. When we succumb to loss aversion, we miss opportunities to learn. Failure is part of the process. We'll experie...

Herman Ye

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