![]() It doesn’t take other use cases into account. The design is for the ideal user, the happy, upbeat, good-life user. In creating this Year in Review app, there wasn’t enough thought given to cases like mine, or friends of Chloe, or anyone who had a bad year. This is another aspect of designing for crisis, or maybe a better term is empathetic design. How many people don’t know about it? Way more than you think. Yes, there’s the drop-down that lets me hide it, but knowing that is practically insider knowledge. The Year in Review ad keeps coming up in my feed, rotating through different fun-and-fabulous backgrounds, as if celebrating a death, and there is no obvious way to stop it. Where the human aspect fell short, at least with Facebook, was in not providing a way to opt out. To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs. It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.Īlgorithms are essentially thoughtless. ![]() It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.īut for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.Īnd I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. “Eric, here’s what your year looked like!”Ī picture of my daughter, who is dead. Until today, when I got this in my feed, exhorting me to create one of my own. Still, they were easy enough to pass over, and I did. I kept seeing them pop up in my feed, created by others, almost all of them with the default caption, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” Which was, by itself, jarring enough, the idea that any year I was part of could be described as great. Knowing what kind of year I’d had, though, I avoided making one of my own. I know they’re probably pretty proud of the work that went into the “Year in Review” app they designed and developed, and deservedly so - a lot of people have used it to share the highlights of their years. In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook. I didn’t go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it.
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