My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience.

For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media:

• “Just because I expressed interest in this show does not mean I want to be inundated with recommendations for its genre”
• “Disregard [that I pressed ‘thumbs up’] my cat walked over the keyboard”
• “I am making bad choices and hatewatching this” (which reminds me of )

What’s great about the examples in Eric’s post is how familiar they are. We can read them and laugh because we’ve had the same thought — “I’m pressing ‘thumbs up’ here, but what I really mean is…”

We know when we click that button that it’s a reductive expression of our experience that’ll be erroneously interpreted, but we do it anyway. As Bryan Cantrill shared from his experience:

There's no way to indicate, “I’m engaging with this, but I hate myself for doing it.” I need another mouse button that is like, “I’m clicking on this, but I’m rage clicking on it and for my own mental health could you not drag more of this in front of me please?”

We know these feedback mechanisms are often a misrepresentation of our actual experience.

Yet we turn around in our professional contexts and see numbers like “142,432 users gave this a ‘thumbs up’” and we forget everything we knew about our own individual experience with these systems. We make it mean what we want it to mean, what’s convenient for measurement and reporting e.g. “Wow, what a great insight about our offerings! Let’s restructure our entire catalog around this new, objective, (pseudo)scientific fact that so many people obviously like this thing!”

We reduce the experiences of others to mere data, but grant ourselves exemption from such oversimplifications.

Where’s the conversation around:

• Values, e.g. “Should we provide more of this? We can say no to the data…”
• Nuance, e.g. “What do people really mean when they click ‘thumbs up’ in this interface?”
• Vision, e.g. “If we provide more of this, where will that lead us?”

But that’s too introspective. Introspection is slow. Ain’t nobody got time for that.