Vol 3. GPT Finds your Holes 😳, Haptic Feedback 📳 and Umbrella (Companies) ⛱️
Dive into the 3rd edition of ‘The Sketch’, exploring how to find potential issues in your work with ChatGPT, experience new dimensions via Haptic feedback, and why Umbrella companies are so bad.
Experience of the week — Haptic feedback
ChatGPT launched its new iOS app last week, and as expected, it was downloaded a ridiculous number of times in a very short period. 500K in 6 days to be exact.
One of the first things you would notice if you were one of the many that got their hands on the app was the landing page for the app 👇🏼
Do you see those lines? Yeah, those don’t actually exist.
But what does actually exist is the vibration that you feel as the animation runs on the top of the screen.
This type of experience is what we call ‘Haptic feedback’. Something Jonny Ive couldn’t stop staying after the iPhone 6s brought out the Force Touch functionality back in 2015.
The interesting point about Haptic Feedback is that they build on the touch dimension in our experience with their defining characteristics.
Depth & Vibration.
Haptic feedback (HF) introduces vibration into the experience for our mobile devices in new ways. It is typical to have vibrations in our experiences, hell, the Nokia bricks would vibrate when we’d get a phone call.
But the vibration here is through feedback. It is more intricate that a call or a change to silent mode on a device. When a user interacts with something on the experience, they could receive haptic feedback.
Taking ChatGPT’s imaginary iMessage abilities to another level.
Haptic experiences can be very powerful for a few reasons:
- No additional UI — as this is a part of the physical experience, to introduce HF into the experience you can keep the UI as is. Keep things simpler.
- Tuck away actions — Users could leverage HF for actions only when they need it. This does come at the cost of discoverability so be careful.
- Emphasise actions/states — HF is used sparingly, and therefore when it is used, it can create emphasis for users. Vibrations are hard to not notice, so you can count on them.
- Peek states — iOS was big on this when it first launched, and HF is great for peeking into experiences, before diving fully into it. This is now a staple across the iOS experience.
Let’s dive into a few examples 👇🏼
iOS has 2 common experiences where they leverage HF well. Photos and Links. Both get a peek mode and actions menu, which allows users to get some information before proceeding to the next action. More #forgiving.
iOS could have its own piece on HF, but for diversity & inclusion, let’s show some other examples too.
ASOS does this when adding to the cart. Remember the emphasising action point? No wonder an e-commerce company wants you to feel the impact of buying something 👀 #EthicalUX
Games are the pinnacle of haptic feedback, as you might remember playing with an Xbox or PlayStation controller when you were younger.
Now think to yourself, where might I want to emphasise, hide or even reward my users?
AI prompt of the week — Finding holes in your work
Our friendly alien knows no bounds. This week, it is intruding into the inner depths of your work to find some massive holes.
I am of course talking about potential gaps in any piece of work. When we create things, we should spend time sense-checking them and reviewing them for any potential issues.
But why would we do that now we have ChatG(Pete’)T?
I’ve found using GPT useful in validating, sense-checking and generally feeling more confident about an idea or piece of work.
Essentially, anytime you have something you will share with someone else, share it with ChatGPT first.
This is fantastic for our daily work with product teams, agencies or other stakeholders.
We can use it to highlight things like:
Practice stakeholder reviews
Prompt: ‘Be a Senior UX Designer and critique this user flow’
Sense check an idea
Prompt: ‘With a huge level of scrutiny, tell me some reasons this idea won’t work’
Highlight risks
Prompt: “What are some things that could go wrong, categorise these in types of risk’
Let’s get into the specifics of this though and look at some real use cases 👇🏼
Colleague Review
I had a review to do with a fellow UX’er and so I wanted to get what I planned to share vetted with a pretend expert UX’er (GPT):
It broke down each of my deliverables and gave me suggestions for what I could do. Rightly, it highlighted the need to get user testing done, or some form of user validation.
I could then take this to my colleague and either highlight the need for more user testing or caveat my work. Both of these help me be more thoughtful in delivery and address a gap in my work.
Summary Review
I asked it to review a summary of my profile for my website, and it gave a glowing review. This is what you might typically get in a GPT conversation. Fantastic.
But this was my first version and I knew I could find areas to improve it, so I asked it be more critical and scrutinise:
And it did just that, giving me 3 key areas to focus on, and highlighting a specific point around which products I’d worked on at the agency. Great stuff.
As always you have the best position to determine if this is useful for you or not, but the fact you’re able to get a thought-provoking response is powerful.
And remember:
Anytime you have something you will share with someone else, share it with ChatGPT first and see what it brings up for you.
Thought piece — Why do Umbrella Companies suck?
Multi-National Conglomerates (MNCs), Large-scale corporates and umbrella companies are so boring. And it made me think, why are they like this?
Corporations are behemoths in all respects. They generate huge volumes of sales, and revenues and to power it all, employ huge amounts of people.
This large-scale operation can naturally lead to some problems.
I believe the problems arise from a few reasons, and I’ve seen this first hand having worked at one (Credit Suisse):
- Red tape — the number of checks and processes needed to protect the brand is quite large
- Beaurocracy — politics is everywhere people are, so the sheer volume of people in these companies makes this a complex web of emotions & ego
- People’s goals — employees join to collect a paycheck rather than anything else, so they’re focused on what to do with their paycheck than anything else #WorkToLive
And when it comes to their digital footprint, specifically their homepage. It is the absolute wild west.
It could also be because someone doesn’t ask the question:
Who is this page for, and what are they trying to achieve?
Is it perhaps that lack of clear call-to-action (CTA) that is making the experience just a little bit… meh?
Because in reality, Umbrella companies can serve many types of people, and trying to craft a page to cater to lots of user types, is normally a bad idea, in fact, its a near-impossible task.
Either way, this is the current state of some of the largest corporates and umbrella companies in the world. RelX, Berkshire Hathaway, JAB Holdings and CK Hutchinson Holdings, which are among the 4 of them, combine for almost $600 billion dollars in revenue annually and yet have websites that were designed in Microsoft FrontPage.
Mo’ money, Mo’ (Design) problems 🤑
Instead, let’s take a leaf out of Fashion brands’ books and take some modern approaches:
Umbrellas are cool. Umbrella companies should be too.
Thanks for reading, read this and other “The Sketch” articles, by subscribing below 👇🏼
