A transcript of Episode 256 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss articles about touch screens in the age of COVID and the popularity of newsletters.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.

Transcript

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you to all our transcript volunteers. You’re doing a great job helping us make sure the transcripts are published together with the podcast. If you’d also like to help out with the podcast, just email that. Hey@uxpodcast.com. That’s hey or hej – you choose.

Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 256.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson,

Per Axbom
and Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
balancing Business Technology, people and society, with listeners in 197 countries and territories in the world, from the United States of America to Vietnam.

Per Axbom
And today, we have something exciting. It’s, it’s a link show. And I feel actually really excited today because I feel like these are the shows that we don’t do very often. But we get to geek out about something very specific. A topic that you choose one topic, I choose one topic and, or one article each and we just dive into it and see what happens

James Royal-Lawson
Do you mean we don’t script these.

Per Axbom
We should…

James Royal-Lawson
Do we ever. But the two articles we’ve got for you today. One of them is about public touchscreens in the COVID era.

Per Axbom
They need a rethink is the subtitle of that one that’s by Mario Noble. He’s a UX designer in Los Angeles, California.

James Royal-Lawson
And the second one up is Newsletters,

Per Axbom
..or an enormous rant about writing on the web, that doesn’t really go anywhere. And that’s okay with me.

James Royal-Lawson
by Robin Rendell he’s a designer at Sentry. He works and lives in San Francisco. Apparently he’s from South-West England.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I found that in his about page.

James Royal-Lawson
I through you off there Per didn’t I… By the way I kind of split up the task of reading out the titles of the articles.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I love that it’s not scripted, because I sort of because I’m not looking at you either. Right now I’m just looking at our two articles. And I didn’t realise what are we doing!?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and everyone’s out there listening, thinking, get on with it.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So this one that you chose, it was dirty. The first thing I thought of when I’m just reading the title of it, the public touchscreens in the COVID era, you think of how dirty – you’ve seen over the years, you’ve seen sort of pictures of keyboards, and how dirty they become. And assuming with a microscope, of course on touchscreens, you’ve seen that as well. And you know that people use their mobile phones, when they’re on the toilet. And it’s just, it feels really filthy. And it’s disgusting. And it’s just sharing all those germs with other people and all these touchscreens, made me want to buy gloves, but I need to buy gloves that work with the touchscreens and it’s like, oh my god, I need to read this article. That was actually my first thinking, just reading the title.

James Royal-Lawson
So the title really triggered the germophobe in you.

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. No, yeah. This this is about, say, what should we do about public touchscreens in the COVID era? And okay, it’s something that all of us have become a lot more aware about sanitization and hygiene during this pandemic. Now, the evidence isn’t kind of, well, the the science behind the COVID and surfaces is a little bit mixed there that mean yes, it stays on surfaces and can survive but isn’t maybe not viable. But the WHO does still recommend that you to be careful with surfaces and and that is to do with the fact that not all surfaces are the same. Some surfaces are much much better at harbouring bacteria and viruses and disease and such that can be viable. Other ones are not really made for, you know, for the job. So things things die pretty, you know, they don’t reproduce, they die off.

Per Axbom
And also made me think I mean, it’s not just about COVID because what we’ve seen, of course, during this past year is that there’s a lot of other diseases and illnesses that also have like plummeted, when it comes to how prevalent they are, so, really changing our behaviour changes everything.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, and that’s exactly it Per. That for me, was what really got me interested in this because it makes you really look back and assess our attitudes towards interfaces we touch. I mean, because we’ve been touching interfaces for you said about keyboards. And we’ve used our hands to interact with computers pretty much since day one. In fact pretty much certainly I don’t think we’re doing it by any other means. Maybe even if even feeding the ticker tape was using your hands to feed it in. But COVID really has put this into the forefront and and making us look at that and think about what we could do.

So I want us to listen to this or think about this, not just from a COVID aspect but but from a hygiene perspective in general. And, well, just to give you some more context or information… examples, I guess about this, like we’ve, we’ve got personal touchscreens like you’ve said, we’ve all got devices, we’ve all got mobile phones, these days, tablets, and so on. But those are personal. They’re, they’re very limited number of people using that device. More often than not. I mean, it’s rare that someone else touches my phone, other than me.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So So as far as kind of spreading germs, bacteria, and so on. That kind of reproduction rate. I suppose you could say from germs on my telephone is probably reasonably limited.

Per Axbom
You can even feel uncertain about lending your phone someone else because you’re always afraid that they’ll see something that they’re not supposed to see,

James Royal-Lawson
Well they’re just really, really personal. Yeah. And I actually do wipe mine every morning. But I don’t like all the greasy finger make you can see.

Per Axbom
Oh, when you said wipe, I thought you were joking that you were actually erasing the content on it.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, no, that Yeah, the tinfoil hat goes on, I just blow on my devices in the morning. Now like I clean my glasses, I clean my phone and so on every morning. It’s part of the routine. But then you’ve got everyday touchscreen, public touchscreen devices. So these are things like we’ve been used for decades with like cash registers – cash dispensers. Point of Sale terminals and self checkout at stores.

Per Axbom
at airports.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, check into airports or even hospitals and and and other medical facilities. That’s quite often now you’ll have to fill in your details on a touchscreen thing before – as far as checking in. Here in Sweden, we’ve got loads of queue mechanisms that are based on pressing a screen or touching the right kind of thing to see which type of errand you’ve come to the shop for and so on. Parking payment systems and devices.

Per Axbom
And if you’re right on public transport, I mean even the button to say you want to get off the bus.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, Restaurants you know this restaurants now we’re Pinchos here in Sweden and in Europe as well, that you know, the whole thing is built on – when the restaurants are open. Ordering stuff on a on your own tablets or tablets that are around. There’s plenty of tablet based ordering goes on in restaurants. When you come into restaurants you can at the beginning of lunch restaurants and so on you maybe press your order on a screen – McDonald’s. All those ones now we’re just touchscreen stuff when you go in.

Per Axbom
How are we even alive?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. So that’s just the touchscreen aspects when you’ve got manual interfaces as well as he brings up in the article. These are the ones like and Don Norman’s gonna love us for this. Non automatic doors. You have handles on doors, you have to push doors, you make touch, you touch surfaces to open and close doors. And railings. A UX-ers favourite lifts and elevators.

Per Axbom
Yeah

James Royal-Lawson
The control panels in those. We we talked about that many times, they’re a whole genres to themselves. You’ve got toilets, public toilets, which generally do have people doing some cleaning work there. So they’re not going to have like without sanitising aspects to public toilets, but you still there’s a lot of things you touch in toilets.

Per Axbom
And it’s interesting about toilets, because when you’re in the restroom, you become more aware of the germs even though they of course exist everywhere. I think I think more in that space. I do actually, I sort of I pull up my sleeve to touch the door handle. That’s why I do it sometimes at crosswalks as well. Because that’s when I become more aware of it for some reason in certain certain spaces.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now you’ll start thinking about that, too, that we have. We have levels of expectation of of hygiene, awareness or hygiene respect, I guess. And the article doesn’t talk about this in particular, but it made me think about it that we have, you know, your health and safety standards when it comes to food handling and restaurants and food preparation, that if you work in those environments, they’re very controlled. There are a lot of laws and rules and things you have to go through education processes to get certificate that you actually you’ve had the education to deal with foodstuff in these kind of environments.

Like you said about toilets, public toilets. We’re all very aware ourselves when we go into these places that, you know, we know when they’re not nice and clean. You see straightaway you sense it when you go in you can just see straight away that bits of paper on the on the floor – ah this one hasn’t been cleaned recently, you can probably look at the list that they have on the back of doors. So when someone signed last time they’re supposed to clean it and you were oh god that was yesterday. Oh no.

So you know, we’ve we’ve got it like a system in place of recognition of hygiene levels and an expectation of hygiene levels and, and even understanding ourselves about what we should be doing. Even though in many situations, we maybe don’t. At least didn’t use to follow protocol as well as we should have done in some of these situations. But when it comes to user interfaces – there, we haven’t until recently, until the pandemic, had any real kind of – not as a population, I don’t think as a world population other than we’ve had to really expectations of how the hygiene aspect would be with some of these interfaces.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So that’s the new thing, it’s that people will actually expect you to, so you can actually improve the user experience by giving the experience of something that is cleaner.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Well, then, if you look at the the article goes on to talk about the advantages of why do we have touchscreens in the first place. Why have we gone to touchscreens? And he lists quite a lot of potential or speculates a lot of the advantages that they are. And it comes to inclusion that this list of advantages, I’m not going to go through them. But the point was here that he realised that these advantages are almost entirely advantages for the business side.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And that the advantages for the for the user from the user perspective, doesn’t really shine through a huge amount on the on the list. In many cases, it’s been, “we need less people if we’ve got a screen instead of a person”.

Per Axbom
Right exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s not like we were screaming for some of these touchscreen devices, it was more that organisations saved money by not having tellers at the bank, they could have a machine outside to dispense money, you don’t need to kind of queue a checkout to kind of pay for your groceries, you could actually do it yourself, all this stuff is giving advantages to the organisations and indirectly maybe gives you cheaper prices.

Per Axbom
Or there’s a shorter queue maybe to those things, then

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But the interface has been used to transfer work from someone else to you effectively in many of these situations, rather than been user driven design for change. So then we move on to the article about things that affect screen usage. Now, during the pandemic, they say he doesn’t say that specifically. But he’s inferring that he’s during the pandemic, that you’re, you’ve got a perceived risk level, when it comes to using an interface by the device in your household, maybe it’s low risk, because it’s very small number of people who are using it.

If if it’s a certain group of staff that use a certain device all the time in a shop, that maybe that’s also reasonably limited, because you think about number of contacts, then the people using the device is very limited. It’s the people at work in the store, then you’ve got maybe a device in a bigger organisation. But you aren’t sure about how it’s kind of been sanitised or controlled. And then you’ve got the ultimate one, the public random space, like people can come up to interface in the street effectively or in a public space and and use it, we have no idea how many people, who’s using, it or anything.

Per Axbom
So interesting about trust, because because you always think of the confined space that you find yourself in. So if it’s only the staff and the store that are using it, you feel safer. But one of one of the people on staff, of course, could have just been in a really dirty place, you have no idea. But that doesn’t really factor into your expectation.

James Royal-Lawson
No. And then I want to the last bit of this I want to bring up really is he talks about the inclusion aspect. And here’s something really interesting, and I don’t think we’ll have time to dig into it fully. But we already know that touchscreens can be can be not hugely inclusive at times. But here we have a situation about whether you’ve got you’re reluctant to use a touchscreen because of the hygiene aspect.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
But you might not have a choice. Because of the way that the organisation or the interface have been designed. There isn’t an alternative to the touchscreen. And that’s a really interesting thing to think about. In from an inclusive design point of view, and pandemics and hygiene in general. How do you cater for the people who need to use your interface, but really don’t feel comfortable? Or maybe feel anxious about using a touch interface now?

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
That was that was very interesting to start thinking about.

Per Axbom
Yeah, feels like it’s gonna just keep growing. Actually.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I’m gonna skip to some kind of conclusions or further thoughts about this is that, he suggests it comes with some possible solutions, suggestions for how we’d avoid or move on from touchscreens. And come to conclusion that foot control was the best one. And I actually don’t really agree because I think that just opens up a whole nother kind of inclusive, inclusive design problems and you know, how do you how do you make that usable for everyone and complex interfaces, because some of these ones we have in existence are quite complex and having to use like stamping on stuff to control it is going to be real challenging.

So I think I think touchscreens are actually here to stay even though we gone through a pandemic and we’re getting worried about the hygiene aspect. But I think maybe we’ll move into a realm where this – we’re definitely gonna expect more hygiene when it comes to interfaces. And, and maybe we’ll see, like, you know, in Japan, they’ve got the whole automated toilets kind of thing where they do all the hygiene themselves, maybe there’s ways of kind of something wiping across the screen to sanitise it. Between usage and you know, a camera would tell, just like, I mean, gents urinals, when you move away from the urinal, a lot of them flush automatically. There’s a lot of self flushing, even toilets now self flushing toilets, because there’s sensor.

Per Axbom
So you could had mentioned UV cleaning, as well. I mean, screens are easier to clean. But and I that’s something I thought about that. We have a lot of keyboards, but screens are should be at least it feels like it should be easier to clean than keyboards are with the wipe mechanism, as you were saying,

James Royal-Lawson
That goes all the way back to the beginning when I said about the how certain surfaces are better for kind of breeding germs and others. Yeah. I’ve read one example the other day about things like athlete’s foot, for example, that thrives fantastically on surfaces. Because the audience is a little bit of moisture and warmth. And it kind of keeps on growing, where things like COVID on a on a hard surface, like glass isn’t going to last very long at all. But you know, so. So then when you think about the different types of surfaces, then our touchscreens don’t really fall into the kind of worst bracket of unhygenic things. But if you don’t do any hygiene whatsoever, then potentially there could be stuff building up on that over time, that isn’t as nice or if the frequency of use means that stuff is quickly transferred.

So I definitely think we’re gonna have, we’re gonna move to thinking more about hygiene and screens. But I wanted to throw out the questions like What can we do now to deal with with improving the, I suppose hygiene of our touchscreen interfaces, if they’re not going away? And I started to think about maybe well, okay, can we? Can we? Should we put reminders on screen about sanitising the screen before use? Should we put reminders about sanitising after use, you know, if you’re doing the self-sanitising route? Can we update our interfaces to reduce the number of touches? So you’re actually touching the actual interface less because we’ve designed – we know that into a lot of interfaces, less touch, less clicks, if we can make it a comparrison with web as well. It’s a good thing in many situations. So maybe that’s another aspect to think about, can we can we reduce the amount of touching to improve hygiene,

Per Axbom
People will have to change to way shorter email addresses to lessen the clicks with you entered their names. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Flashcards that they can scan, you can hold up a flashcard or your email address and it scans it off.

Per Axbom
I’m now seeing the the screens and interfaces themselves as toilets because you would actually have to have a flush button that you press after each use you flush – flush the screen and you actually clean it off,

James Royal-Lawson
or wave your hand in front of a sensor and it will then wipe across. It’s fascinating This is so this was this really did get me thinking about a lot of different aspects of, of industrial design, user interface, design, inclusive design, understanding people’s emotions or feelings when they’re using interfaces. So I think it’s a it’s a really good article to get you – to trigger the whole grey matter and get you thinking about the wild world, the wider world we design in.

Per Axbom
Yeah, loved it.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So moving on to something completely different. We’re going to talk about newsletters, well, at least the article is named newsletters. And but it is really an enormous rant, as we mentioned. And there are no real conclusions, I think, but it raises some important issues. And some things I think that you and I talked about from time to time, over the years, how content lives on the web, how its distributed, and how it’s archived. And it really starts out as a love letter to newsletters.

James Royal-Lawson
Before you go into the details of that, I just want to give our listeners a if they haven’t looked at it yet, then it’s it’s really interesting how this this article is presented.

Per Axbom
Yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
Because he’s presented almost poetically..

Per Axbom
It’s beautiful.

James Royal-Lawson
…with with short, well just small paragraphs or even just sentences on a picture black and white, old kind of sketch or whatever, presented the same time as the text and you move at a screen at a time between – like, almost like a presentation of these poetic lines in the article.

Per Axbom
Yeah, so it’s impossible to read it fast. Which, it forces you to reflect on on each sentence. And I don’t know if you’ve tried it on mobile, it’s the same beautiful experience on mobile as well. So it’s, it’s really well done. And it’s actually something to remember when we go on and talk about the content and how it’s distributed because something like this wouldn’t fit into a newsletter. And I don’t know really what it would fit into, to be replicated.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s a little bit, the irony of this.

Per Axbom
Exactly, yes!

James Royal-Lawson
He’s produced something which can’t work as a newsletter.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Because it’s a piece of art.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
I think that perhaps is one of his points, because, I mean, he’s expressing his love of newsletters. But quickly goes on in this intro in the first part, of actually four parts, but he goes on, and part one starts later. And he expresses his disappointment on this, how could this be the future and really, that, when we when we do newsletters, it feels like we’re going back to something old. Because it’s

James Royal-Lawson
parchment, he’s talking books, he said books were going back to parchment paper.

Per Axbom
It’s somewhat antiquated. It says, and so and, and books are so much better than parchment in the same way that websites are so much better than email. Yes, exactly. And he tries to try to try to think of some reasons why this could be that people are choosing to publish newsletters. I mean, it really has grown. I don’t, I don’t have any stats with me. But people are talking about Substack these days, every other day, someone starting a new newsletter. It’s like, back in the day when everybody was starting a podcast. Now everybody’s starting a newsletter. So part of it is, it’s really, really easy to publish. Anyone can type text on a keyboard, well, not anyone, but you know what I mean? So once you can do that you have something right, you go somewhere, you write a newsletter, you press publish, and you have some subscribers, and it distributes to all those subscribers. Which means that it also notifies all the subscribers automatically because they get the email. And everybody knows how email works.

And there is another aspect of it is, of course, why writers can get paid by newsletters, and perhaps more easily than you get paid by publishing on a blog, for example. And alternatively, he’s also suggesting that websites are difficult to make. And they can’t notify people when new things are published. And we’ll get more to that. And they aren’t able to pay writers as easily. And the difficult to make part is what frustrates him because now we have come we’re in 2021 now. We’re in a time when websites can be beautiful. And I think that’s why he’s made this post so beautiful to exemplify this. But it’s not for everyone. Everyone can’t do this. And so he’s he’s looking for a solution to this and going after a world where we actually publish content on the web, and provide the ability for people to subscribe to that content and for the content producers to get paid. And of course, anyone listening who is familiar with RSS is thinking RSS, because that is the solution, isn’t it? That is how content on the web has been distributed for decades.

James Royal-Lawson
How we use it for podcasts, I mean,

Per Axbom
Exactly

James Royal-Lawson
Whole, the whole world of podcasts is fundamentally built on RSS.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So if you don’t know what RSS is, you are using it because it’s the way that the content is distributed. That’s how this episode came into your podcast player is because there’s a text file somewhere pointing to it. That text file is called RSS.

James Royal-Lawson
even if you’re listening on Spotify, or on Apple podcasts because we feed them with our RSS, and then they re-use that. So it’s all RSS for podcasts.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And this is what we find so interesting. Because when we It seems so obvious that those of us who understand and have used RSS for many years. Many people use us to use Feedburner as the way to access content on the web and read different stories from blogs from news sites, because they all had RSS feeds. Many still do today. But the the awareness of what RSS is and how you can use it to your advantage is not that widespread. And he one of the things that he is suggesting, Robin is suggesting that we actually if RSS was to be rebranded then that could be a way forward.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m still angry at Google.

Per Axbom
Yes, I am extremely angry at Google for killing RSS.

James Royal-Lawson
Because they, they killed basically they killed it off and I still am on cross still because they didn’t just move it into Gmail, because I think they could have moved RSS. It would have fit into Gmail. But they didn’t do that. They just killed off their Reader.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So that’s what we saw as the start of the death of it.

Per Axbom
Somebody even suggested on Twitter to me, when I shared this article. That this was the perfect platform for starting a social media platform. Because you had people who were really engaged in this tool, and you could have connected them with with each other as well. And just it’s just so frustrating. I can feel this frustration because RSS is so extremely simple. It’s standardised. it works. It’s been used. But and and for me that is the UX problem. Why isn’t it getting used by more people? What is making it so, so hard to use? Why are not people not publishing blogs instead of newsletters? Because the problem, of course, with newsletters is that the content gets lost, it’s not searchable on the web, you can’t find it by a search engine, it won’t go into archive.org as something that you can search up there. So it kind of gets lost as well. which, to me, is the sad part of this, when people choose newsletter as their distribution way.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re right, it is. It does it. If you think about the effort goes into producing content, then newsletters are quite tragic in that sense that you, you don’t have a long shelf life for a newsletter.

Per Axbom
Right. And exactly, and and often when I try, I find some. I sometimes start subscribing to a newsletter, and it turns out, there’s no archive of the earlier ones, which, there of course, would be if you had a blog post, but sometimes I realised people also switch platforms. So Oh I tried this platform, and then I tried that platform. So all their content, even if it’s saved on the, the the company that supplies the solution for their newsletter distribution, even if it’s saved there, they don’t move the content from one to the other as they change platform. So it keeps getting lost in different containers across the web, which are really hard to find.

James Royal-Lawson
Don’t start me off on redirects Per.

Per Axbom
Sorry?

James Royal-Lawson
Don’t start me off on redirects and how bad we are.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So it’s so essentially, we’re saying that the reason people use the antiquated technology is because it’s easier to use, there’s less friction, and we’ve failed completely at making it a frictionless experience, or more appealing experience, to actually publish in a way that the content becomes more available, and more future proof as well.

James Royal-Lawson
I think also about the whole expectations thing ties in with the first article that we seem to have still got lower expectations of how a newsletter is designed, or how it looks. I mean, I’m gonna – if the content is good, I’m gonna read it, even if it’s just plain text. Whereas our expectation for a website, if I was if I was met by something as simple as the newsletter, I mean, okay, medium got quite close in many ways. Some of these articles, sites are very slimmed back. But I think by and large, our expectations are more kind of busy when it comes to design of content on websites compared to content on on or via email.

Per Axbom
Mm hmm. Exactly. And something that struck me as as I was pondering upon newsletters, and statistics and I was looking at people who’ve started Substacks, and they’re saying, Oh, I’m pressing send, now I’m sending to 200,000 subscribers. it’s the same problem as we have when doing podcasts and doing podcast statistics is that you send something out, and you can maybe see how many open and some people actually you can’t see if they open because they blocked if you see opening, and and some people, of course, will just open the email and delete it.

And a lot of people won’t read it. So it’s just impossible to know how many readers you have. You know, how many subscribers you have, you have no idea how many actually read it and have actually created rules for for sending your for your email or newsletter straight to the to the, to the trash. So that aspect of it really intrigued me and really looking at all these numbers that people throw out. I’m sending it to this and this many subscribers, what does that really say?

James Royal-Lawson
But I guess ultimately, you I don’t know if you want to move into the paying for content aspects, but that that is kind of, I suppose the more important metric for people who are producing content. And well, for a living or to earn money from them. How many how many read it doesn’t really matter is how many paid you I suppose is more important.

Per Axbom
Right, exactly. And sometimes you can probably make some conclusions around how many of my subscribers are willing to pay for the content. But the way that it works is that a lot of people just have people sign up for free at first to get as many subscribers as possible. So it’s really hard to measure that. How that fraction of users how many they will be in the end. And I can’t say that I’m really an expert on the pate how how people pay for for newsletters and how much they pay. It seems to me to be a whole new world because I don’t, I pay – I don’t pay for newsletters. I haven’t started yet at least I don’t know if you do?

James Royal-Lawson
No, I don’t either. But but at the same time, the article talks about how paying and subscribing to a writer’s work should be one click away. And we’ve had things like Patreon. What was that service wedding Sweden where you could add a little kind of button on your website to click and make a micro payment?

Per Axbom
Yes exactly. Right.

James Royal-Lawson
What was that called? Oh, anyway. But but that’s a whole thing about how, you know, you kind of want as a writer, when you’re writing something you want to offer people the ability to reward you. We’ve just clicked like, you would click a Like button or kind of a heart or whatever on something that you do that and you would get a little bit of money. And the article talks about some of the systems that are developing to do with that I think Coil and Puma.

Puma is a browser, I think. I don’t really know much about them. But they’re, they’re trying to build on a web monetization API. So as in you’d, you would have the mechanisms behind and a wallet will be connected. And if you clicked on something, it would allow micropayment to someone for the content they’ve done. And actually, I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s one of the things I’ve always really hoped we could get to. Because there are many times when I’ve clicked “like” on something. And I’ve thought now that this actually is really good. And I’d be prepared to pay, you know, a few cents a few pence or a few kronor, or whatever, to reward writers for some of their work, because it’s, it’s given me some value. And maybe don’t want to subscribe.

Per Axbom
Right. Now I have to mention that it actually medium offer something like that as well. If you say that on Medium you published an article and say, I want to get paid for this article, then actually, the people who do pay for subscribing to Medium as they like stuff, the the amount of money or is distributed across all these likes, or claps as they’re called on Medium. So there are versions of that around. But there’s nothing as of yet getting standardised, it’s still people are not choosing to publish on the web, I think because it appears too difficult.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it is still not just writing words, you have to do a lot of other things to to get your stuff out there.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
There’s a quote here from him. And he says, “I see this, I see the web as this public good that’s been hijacked by companies trying to sell us mostly heartless junk.” And I know that’s, I think I mean, you’re both got that feeling about, infact Heather Burns! We both read an article, also another article coming today. But she wrote an article about how basically how millennials haven’t kind of like lived the dream that maybe as generation Xers have done when the web was still in its early days and we thought it would be this wonderful utopia, where we could publish all content, it would all be free, and everything was connected to everything, oh it’s all wonderful!

And then the next generation growing up have been in this kind of Facebook closed world where everything has to do with sucking advertising information from you and selling you stuff. And that free open web that we had in our vision in the beginning, is already gone. So they’re they’re trying to fix, in Heather’s article, she talked about how with privacy concerns now we’re trying to fix the issues caused by the closed web, rather than re-vigorate and re-introduce the dreams of the open web.

Per Axbom
Yeah. Oh it’s so true. I love that article. We need to link that in the show notes as well. And…

James Royal-Lawson
This is, this is completely connected to it, though. Because the death of RSS, the rise of paywalls, the growth of newsletters, the monetization of content, you know, it’s all this stuff is interconnected.

Per Axbom
And I think I think that is exactly what Robin is feeling as well, because he’s trying to end on the positive note. I mean, he’s excited about this sudden popularity of newsletters, because it shows how desperately people still want this kind of writing. And that is the kind of writing that we, for me, we used to have back in the day. And so we value the web in that way. And we just need to, as he puts it, take the web back.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s a revolution.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So did we have any suggested listening after this, James?

James Royal-Lawson
We always do. Got two for ya. First up reasonably recent episode, Episode 251, where we talked multimodal design, with Cheryl Platz. And it feels feels relevant now when we’ve talked about touchscreens and different ways of interacting with, with interfaces that if you haven’t already listened, listen to Episode 251 then do that because that’s a really interesting chat about the challenges, not just of voice, but other types of, or multiple interfaces that you can deal with in your work.

Per Axbom
And you put another one in here, that’s Episode 50. James and Per begin with words. That’s a long time ago.

James Royal-Lawson
That is, oh god, that’s over seven years ago now Per. And that’s where we, we talk about just words and simplicity of, of the importance of the content, I guess you could say.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, that’s the Oh, is that the one that would “this is a webpage” like that? Yes. Around this about it. Okay. People remember that… some of us.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah. But again, links to the important of just the words and content and how they are the things that we need to lift up.

Per Axbom
So if you can spare a little bit of your time, then join our little community of volunteers. We’re always…

James Royal-Lawson
…It’s like a micropayment!

Per Axbom
Oh yes.

James Royal-Lawson
If you don’t want to give us some money because I mean, we do allow people to contribute some money. But that’s just one form of kind of payment you can give us. The other one, of course is you can donate a little bit of your time.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And it’s so so appreciated.

James Royal-Lawson
And we’re always looking for people to help with the transcripts and now even the publishing.

Per Axbom
Remember to..

James Royal-Lawson
So email us. Sorry Per, I just wanted to say email us. Say hello.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
James Did you know The first French fries were not actually cooked in France?

James Royal-Lawson
No Per, I didn’t know that the first French fries were not actually cooked in France.

Per Axbom
Yeah, they were cooked in Greece.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, not only a bad joke, but a tongue twister.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in February 2021 and published as episode 256 of UX Podcast.