I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc…

…and in new to-do items:

This bothered me for two reasons.

First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or something personal and heartfelt? At Medium back in the day, at some point we added a fun celebratory dialog after publishing that said something like “Now, shout it out from the rooftops!” We took it down very quickly as people made us realize Medium is used to write many kinds of things we didn’t anticipate, and in those situations the cutesy message really failed to read the room.

But the other half of my frustration with Paper was that it felt like the app was making itself too comfortable in my space, in effect shouting all over my inner voice and distracting me. I felt like any app giving you a creative canvas should back off of that canvas unless it’s explicitly invited to participate.

Turns out, I can now attach something tangible to that discomfort. From Scientific American earlier this week (emphasis mine):

The researchers asked participants to fill in an online survey with questions about hot-button social and political issues. Some were prompted with an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased toward one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.

Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.

Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study.

The quoted study shows an example…

…and elaborates on how adding warnings didn’t really help:

The Warning and Debrief messages failed to significantly reduce the attitude shift, which is concerning because they were also inspired by those used in real AI applications. AI tools such as ChatGPT show brief and general statements about AI’s propensity to hallucinate false information (e.g., “ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes. Check important info.”), similar to the messages used in our interventions.

I know on this blog I often focus on the mechanics of interactions, but the job of every designer is to think of more than that. I keep coming back to both pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll mechanics. Both can be put to good use and feel “delightful,” but both started being abused so much that it led to their respective creators disowning them.

Nice, clear, simple copy in ClarisWorks from 1997:

No “Maybe later.” No “Not now.” Thirteen characters. Now, Later, Never.

(Can’t help but notice that Esc and ⌘. – the classic Mac’s equivalent of Esc – still map to Later, however. Also, this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat.)

In my head, some bugs belong to categories that feel important, and yet remain hard to define and quantify: embarrassing bugs, dumb bugs, flow killers.

Somewhere in the hard-to-explain space is another tricky category: UI decisions that feel cheap.

The examples of cheapness that come to my mind readily will, I bet, be different for each one of you reading this:

• using emoji instead of iconography
• using text and typography instead of graphic design elements as UI (except in terminal/​text-based interfaces)
• excessive centering
• obvious misalignments and overflows
• accidentally mismatched fonts and unspecified fallback fonts
• reflow and bad loading states that do not match the eventual UI
• selectable user interface element that betray “bad webiness” of the UI
• typos

But my absolute #1 go-to example is definitely this:

Computers could pluralize nouns basically for free already in the 1970s, and sure, there are objective arguments of why this is bad, but there’s also this: I wince so hard every time I see something like this.

I think it’s important for every designer to notice when they wince, and teach others how to wince and notice, too.

(I stole the brilliant title from this short post by Joe Leech in 2018, in which Leech uses the word “lazy” rather than “cheap” – they’re related!)

When you start a new game in SimCity 2000 (you can try it in the browser yourself), as the city is generated, you see a few messages fly by: Creating Hills, Tracing Rivers, Smoothing. Among them, for a bit, one can see “Reticulating Splines”:

If it was not obvious from seeing Smoothing followed by More Smoothing and then Yet More Smoothing, the phrase is a joke. From The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook:

“Reticulating splines” is a giant pulling of our legs. Will and some others made up the phrase because they thought it looks and sounds as if it means something. It might: the word “reticulate” means to divide something so that it looks like, or appears to be, a net or a network generating, perhaps, from a single point; a “spline” can be an irregular curve or the approximation of a curve. Individually the terms have meaning. Together – in the case of SimCity 2000 – they don’t. It’s just a prank and a joke.

In some versions of the game, there was also a seductive woman’s voice saying the phrase out loud, which presumably made it even more memorable.

The phrase moved to other Maxis games, notably The Sims…

…and subsequently Minecraft…

…and then tons of other places.

I’ve heard the argument that it wasn’t just Reticulating Splines – that Will Wright’s joke was the beginning of the habit of putting “cute” loading messages in apps, including actual not-game and definitely-not-cute applications. I am 100% sure there are some earlier examples of “funny” loading or error states, but I also see how this one attained a certain critical mass and influence.

I hate these cute loading strings with passion. I think I’m in the minority. It’s a topic for a future time, but it was fun at least to trace some part of its history, sifting through hundreds of pages earnestly explaining the concept of “reticulating splines” to people. Whether they’re in on the joke, I am not sure.

Also, okay. Fair enough. I chuckled just now when I saw this:

This is inside my Sony Alpha camera: a teensy too technical, or maybe slightly-lost-in-translation-from-Japanese message. I love it. It has personality without trying to be cute.

From my friend Robin Rendle:

But here’s what modern UI design looks like: There’s always a confusing title; it doesn’t quickly tell me what to do or what it wants me to understand; beneath that there’s a subtitle, explaining the title again; beneath that there’s several sentences that restates the title and subtitle but simply jumbles all the words around to make it justify its existence; then the button—there is always a button—and it asks me to “Confirm” or “Apply” but as to what I’m confirming or applying I have absolutely no idea unless I go back to the text and fight my way through it all again.

Kept nodding through this whole essay. I don’t love nervous user interfaces that share their own problems and insecurities with their users. I love confident interfaces that know exactly what to say, and don’t outstay their welcome.