12 OCTOBER 2019|COMPUTERSHOPPER|ISSUE 380
RANTS&RAVES
“HAVEALITTLEpatience.” These four little words, penned in 2006
by boyband Take That, could be agreat mottofor us all to adopt in
this modern, digital world. While Gary,Mark, Jason and Howard
might have been referring to watching their bank balances steadily
rise thanks to some dodgy tax-avoidance scheme,the art of patience
seems to have little place in the waywelive now.
At arecent conference hosted by customer service software firm
Zendesk,Ilistenedwithgrowingalarmto examplesofhowwecannot
bear to wait foranything any more.Why go intoyour local
Starbucks or Costa and queue with all the other schmucks foryour
soydecaf mocha lattewhen you can pre-order it on an app on your
smartphone,and have it ready to collect when you arrive in store?
In China, we heard, there’s now acoffee shop that delivers your
order to your desk just 18 minutes later.Soyou don’t even have to
wasteall that valuable time and energy leaving your office to walk
Inthesedaysofinstant gratification,patienceisanunderratedvirtue.
Althoughwe’refastrunningout of it when it comestoTwitter
RANTS&RAVES& SS
two minutes down the road and suffer possible
interactions with other actual human beings, and can
just staysitting in your swivel chair,talking to friends,
colleagues, or better still AI systems, on the internet.
Ihaveseveralissueswiththedirectionwe’reheading.
First, apractical one: if we all start using pre-order or
delivery systems to get our morning coffee,the queues
forthe former will end up longer than those forwalk-ins;
while the latter will be waiting alot longer than 18 minutes fortheir
caffeine fix as streets become even more snarled up with couriers.
There’s also the laziness factor.For years now,I’ve had avision of
Humanity 2050, with people literally fused with their sofas, ordering
everything theywant via some embedded chip in their brain and
letting their robot servant do all the work forthem. Remove all our
reasons to get up and leave the house each day, and our bodies may
well just give up with limbs and brain function, letting the machines
operateonour behalf.
So let’s rediscover the lost art of patience,and take afew
minutes each daytostand in line at that coffee shop or to stroll
round the block, and maybe even chat to someone in the queue.
Just don’t try this in London, as it will likely lead to suspicion
or outright terror among the other customers, and possibly a
harassment charge.
TWITTERANDIhave astrange relationship.Asajournalist it’s an
essential part of my toolkit, but also one I’m quitereluctant to have
in there,like aspanner made out of rotting beef.
Twitter has become an increasingly unpleasant place to visit. If
it’s not the armies of racist bots (let alone the actual racists), it’s the
crowbarred-in adverts, or the timeline that doesn’t understand how
time works. Recently,the desktop sitewent from at least afamiliar
hellscapetofull-onHieronymusBoschbycompletelychangingtheUI.
Cue,not undeservedly,the typed screams of afew million users.
There’s always consternation when the interface of apopular service
changes, and sometimes it’s down to the natural human trait of not
liking change.This is different: it’s agenuinely bad UI. Keyfeatures
laybehind vague symbols, themselves moved to adifferent side of
the screen from their previous positions, while the space foractual
tweets is only slightly wider than the carpet-bomb
blast radius of all the ‘engagement’ guff on the right.
All this is flanked by strips of pointless empty space,
which are at least afun metaphor forTwitter itself.
Ihateit, and would at least not go fordrinks with
whoever approved it. Perhaps it would have been an
acceptable price to payifitwere part of some wider
attempt to improve Twitter as awhole,but it really is just aset
of new clothes. The increased prominence of the ‘Trends foryou’
section is particularly aggravating: at the time of writing it’s showing
acombination of things I’m civically obliged to be aware of but only
begrudgingly acknowledge (awful politicians), things I’m only rarely
amused by (awful football managers) and, forwhatever reason,
Blackpool Tower (which Ihaven’t visited, but looks lovely). I’m not
that shy about telling algorithms what I’m actually interested in, but
that would presumably make the feature toouseful.
Even worse than this is the knowledge that no amount of
complaining will reverse the changes. Clearly,weneed to take this
up to ahigher authority.Afterall, why are we going after big tech
companies forpetty misdemeanours such as tax avoidance,or
enabling attacks on our democratic institutions and values, when
we could be making them payfor creating arubbish UI?
James
Archer
Madelin
e Benn
ett
twe
bla
All
whi
who
accept
attempt t
James
Archer
JJames
di
two
int
jus
Fir
delive
forthe
while the la
