This is a beautiful, visionary optimization of something that desperately needs work. Bookmarks are a hilariously shitty way of organizing knowledge, and without them, you only have information.
Yet. The problems addressed aren't the problems I have.
I'm wondering what kind of UX research was done putting this together. To me it looks like the research was hyper-focused, and didn't give the subjects enough scope to ask questions or bend the research away from optimization of kinetics and ask about their deeper goals, and this has inflected the goals of the product itself. I think this happens often in UX research, as well as psychology and sociology. (The three are related.)
For example. "Subject files bookmarks 0.5% faster" is not an interesting goal, but it is very easy to measure, which is why UX research often degenerates into wild local minima chases.
It feels good to get technical on a problem with a nice clean metric, it feels disciplined to value gains measured in a single percent or less. It feels like progress. But it can be little more than a distraction if there are bigger gains left on the table; worthy goals passed over because of the difficulty characterizing them and hence of evaluating the outcome of an attempt to achieve them.
To me, this is a shining example of how you can do everything right and still get it not quite right. That's the sort of thing that tells you your theory of how something works (UX innovation, in this case) can come apart from practice.
We sense this as an absence of insight, like the creator of the software didn't quite understand how we want to be with it.
That said, thumbprick shows promise, and insight is overrated. This is a near miss that could easily become a hit, check back soon.
Yet. The problems addressed aren't the problems I have.
I'm wondering what kind of UX research was done putting this together. To me it looks like the research was hyper-focused, and didn't give the subjects enough scope to ask questions or bend the research away from optimization of kinetics and ask about their deeper goals, and this has inflected the goals of the product itself. I think this happens often in UX research, as well as psychology and sociology. (The three are related.)
For example. "Subject files bookmarks 0.5% faster" is not an interesting goal, but it is very easy to measure, which is why UX research often degenerates into wild local minima chases.
It feels good to get technical on a problem with a nice clean metric, it feels disciplined to value gains measured in a single percent or less. It feels like progress. But it can be little more than a distraction if there are bigger gains left on the table; worthy goals passed over because of the difficulty characterizing them and hence of evaluating the outcome of an attempt to achieve them.
To me, this is a shining example of how you can do everything right and still get it not quite right. That's the sort of thing that tells you your theory of how something works (UX innovation, in this case) can come apart from practice.
We sense this as an absence of insight, like the creator of the software didn't quite understand how we want to be with it.
That said, thumbprick shows promise, and insight is overrated. This is a near miss that could easily become a hit, check back soon.