RE: Your Content Feed Is Broken
https://medium.com/@tyrale/your-content-feed-is-broken-f8c6576077c2
“Our Point of Acknowledgment is the moment when we (the user) understand what we are viewing and can then recall that this information has been consumed. It is a continuous moving variable that helps us track where we are in time.”
Time tracking doesn’t require acknowledging every point though, just enough discrete points that we get a sense of moving forward, coupled with the critical assurance that the points will not rearrange themselves.
Movie and book analogies are broken, both experiences are designed knowing the content volume is fixed (designed is a very generous term if you are dealing with dvd/blueray UIs .. or most devices for hard media for that matter)
Interesting concept but naive implementation just optimizes for a different view habit, the author acknowledges this by saying: “Each feed will need to choose an appropriate location to place new users.” - this is a non-trivial problem, deciding a user’s content priority is hard, if you are picking one and dictating then we are just setting things up so that another well intentioned blog post like this will come up saying ‘wouldn’t it be great to have our media presented like X’
“whining as loud as the rest of you” - Dismissing issues as whining is a massive fallacy. User experience is not just design, it isn’t just entry points, it covers the gamut of ways the user and the medium interact; experience is not a one way phenomenon.
How you treat people’s data is part of experience as if you fuck up they experience it. Whether it is losing credit card details or leaking browsing habits, the experience lives beyond a page view if you choose to retain data.
The fundamental we are dealing with, once again is, ‘how do I track my position in a world changing to rapidly to comprehend alone?’.
This question remains open and is hard, I believe these problems are solvable with going down the road of companies/websites/etc saying ‘well with just one more bit of data we can make your life better, wait…no just two more bits’.