
Laughter Doesn’t Scale - joshwa
https://trackchanges.postlight.com/laughter-doesn-t-scale-89d3e5687a24#.aba785fx4
======
blakeyrat
The problem isn't that it's a joke. The problem is that Google didn't do any
kind of UX thinking behind the change. (It doesn't matter whether the change
is serious or a joke, you can't just ignore the user experience.)

The new button performed a destructive action (because it blocked the
recipient from responding to the email thread) without any kind of
confirmation. Additionally, it was placed where it was likely to be hit by
accident. (Apparently where the "Send & Archive" button used to be, although I
don't have that on my Gmail theme.)

In short, they didn't _test_ the damned thing. Even a half-hour of user-
testing would have shown how easily the button was pressed by accident, and
how devastating an accidental press was.

And again: it doesn't matter if the change is a joke or not, you _don 't_ push
up a change unless you've done some basic UX work on it.

~~~
shogun21
Good UX is every action should be reversible. And have confirmations before
any destructive behavior.

However, that completely goes against the point of this joke. It's not a prank
if they prompted, "Are you sure you want to send a Minion gif and mute
yourself from this conversation?"

~~~
eru
> Good UX is every action should be reversible. And have confirmations before
> any destructive behavior.

Nah, people just click through. GMail has a much better model: mask
destructive / un-undoable behaviour behind a short timer, make the action
undo-able until the timer is up.

~~~
ketralnis
Is that not what reversible means?

~~~
eru
In some sense, yes. I guess it depends on how you want to define your words.

Strictly, the action you start when you click `Send' is reversible for a few
seconds, before it actually launches the nukes. But I'd rather call it
`delayed' when talking to a human about it.

Delaying is a way to make some non-reversible actions sort-of reversible.

------
danso
I think the bigger lesson is...don't mess with interfaces that a billion users
have gotten accustomed to. Think of the massive outcry that happens on a
redesign...With so many users, even a rarely used button like Send + Archive,
is going to be used in thousands of ways that you do not anticipate. And I'm
guessing a fairly innocuous feature change did not go through many levels of
QA testing before they rolled it out on April 1

~~~
dkersten
Don't mess with interfaces that a billion users _rely_ on.

------
studentrob
Hmm. Laughter doesn't scale when you're not funny. Plenty of viral YouTube
videos have shown that it sure as heck can scale.

The problem with this button is fairly obvious in hindsight. Google injected
humor into many people's business and personal worlds where it wasn't wanted
or expected.

This article is yet another apologist for what is clearly a lack of foresight
by Google.

By the way, I notice society explaining away a lot of behavior by others
lately. People seem afraid to criticize products and other people these days.

Let's call this what it is: a massive mistake. Google corrected it as soon as
they realized it and apologized. We can move on.

~~~
13thLetter
If the stories of people missing out on job offers and so forth are true,
Google did real damage to their lives and should make amends somehow.

I'll freely grant that I don't know what, specifically, they should do, but
"sorry lol" doesn't really cut it.

~~~
arghimonmobile
If I were one of those duped users, I'd expect a service subscription refund
from Google. Or maybe a few months' service on the house. At least.

/s

~~~
13thLetter
Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it.

Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're
selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They
aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took
them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central
part of their professional and personal lives.

What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion
people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else?

If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people
paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that
point is not at all clear.

------
jmduke
I've been reading _Design for Real Life_
([https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-
life](https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life)), and its
introduction is a fairly similar mirror of this kind of snafu -- using
Facebook's "Your Year in Moments" feature as a stand-in.

When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the
awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling
faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match
up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the
collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of
users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be
more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past
year")

Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, _stress cases_ )
exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions.
Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and
UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.

~~~
mgkimsal
What's so odd about that is it's literally trivial to see that trainwreck well
in advance. Maybe not if the entirety of your internal culture caters to sub
35 years old.

~~~
jmduke
The willful ignorance of the assumption that everyone using your product is a
happy, well-off individual with no sad/traumatic events in recent history is
akin to the willful ignorance that nobody will try passing in a negative
number to a method which takes an integer as an argument.

------
mcguire
" _There is no science behind this chart, but we’re consultants._ "

And they say humor doesn't scale.

------
skybrian
Laughter is an all clear signal indicating that something looks weird but is
actually harmless. If someone doesn't think you're funny, maybe they don't
trust you enough to think you're harmless.

Strangers are always going to require more convincing than friends.

~~~
gohrt
Exactly. Humor requires context, and _context_ doesn't scale easily.

------
minimaxir
It is _entirely_ possible to be comedic in tech. But the risks outweigh the
benefits, unless you have a strong comedic background and a _very_ strong
understanding of your audience and context.

"My friends laughed at it!" is a common standard for tech humor nowadays. It's
highly misleading especially if you are a part of the echo chamber.

~~~
girvo
Agreed. As an example, the Pinboard dev (idlewords?) is quite hilarious in a
dry, caustic but extremely cheerful way. I could never be as funny as they
are, it's just not part of my skill set!

------
aantix
Laughter definitely scales, it's just not infinitely scalable..

The Onion scales. It doesn't scale past the Generation X audience, but oh, it
scales.

~~~
coldtea
You'd be amazed at how many of the "Generation X" have taken the Onion for
real, or stand for the exactly inverse ideals.

It's like people think every 20 something in the sixties was progressive, but
there were tens of millions of conservative kids that grew up into
conservative adults...

~~~
gohrt
What are Onion's ideals?

~~~
evan_
The onion doesn't have a strongly-defined partisan political stance, but it
overwhelming "punches up" rather than punching down- meaning the butt of the
joke is a person or organization with more power than the audience.

To me, this point-of-view tends to look more progressive than conservative,
but I might be overlaying my own biases.

------
kuschku
A joke should be simple, globally understandable – and if it isn’t
understandable, shouldn’t be too annoying – and it should never be
destructive.

Changing GMail to render (but not send!) all emails in Comic Sans would be
such a change. (With a notification at top to turn it off)

Offering "Clippy" now also in Hotmail would be such a change. (with the
ability to hide it)

Adding a "Send (and attach a gif that makes me seem like an idiot, and nuke
the conversation)" button where a normal send button used to be is not.

A good joke is hard, and we all have made jokes that backfired before. But for
a corporation, such as Google, in a huge project of theirs, they should try to
double and triple check each joke for damage it might do.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" it should never be destructive"_

it's particularly important to account for psychological or social
destructiveness.

Rickrolling someone can be funny. Pretending that you're pregnant and then
saying "April Fools" later in the day can be psychologically harmful to those
who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child. Replacing someone's PC
startup sound with flatulence can be hilarious. Posting a fake, mean story
about someone else can prompt others to pile on thinking that you're serious,
and damage a relationship. Rendering all webpages in Comic Sans is worth a
chuckle. Nuking someone's e-mail conversation can cost people their jobs, or
at the very least can result in important (business-critical or even life-
critical) information getting lost in the shuffle.

This joke could have been funny, if it had been carefully tailored to be non-
dangerous and non-destructive. It wasn't.

------
Animats
Was this Gail Harrison's doing?[1] She's Illumination Entertainment's head of
marketing and branding. She would have had to sign off on this for Google to
use a Minions™ character.

Gail is a major figure in the branding industry. She was behind the branding
of The Simpsons characters. She managed the Disney Princesses branding. Before
her work, there were princesses in Disney films, but they hadn't been
harnessed into a supergroup merchandising team, pulling over $3 billion a year
in tie-in sales.

"Mic drop" had to have her approval.

[1] [http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-
harrison...](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison-
marketing-branding-president-1201725127/)

~~~
aerovistae
This small profile of Gail Harrison seems largely irrelevant and reads like
you're trying to hype her up to make some sort of a sell.

~~~
Animats
It's more about blame. Someone whose job implies a professional understanding
of humor at scale signed off on this. How did that happen? A good question for
the trades (Variety, THR) to take up.

~~~
Absentinsomniac
Maybe google just licensed or asked to use it as a part of an undefined April
fools joke, and she / they assumed Google wouldn't do something irresponsible?

~~~
Animats
We don't know. But she should, and the trade magazines can ask her. Hollywood
talks to the press.

------
exolymph
If you're interesting in this garbage fire, I recommend reading Andy Baio's
whole Twitter thread:
[https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304](https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304)

~~~
Grue3
This seems hilarious to me, sounds like an outcome of a good prank. Why
exactly does Google need to apologize to these users? What are they gonna do,
switch to Hotmail? When you're as big as Google, you can completely shut down
entire services like Google Reader and get away with it.

~~~
cauterized
Maybe they don't need to apologize to the users tweeting at them. But maybe
you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this
accidentally?

~~~
djrogers
> maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit
> this accidentally?

I would be willing to wager large sums of money that this didn't happen, and
even larger sums that if it did, it was resolved in about 18 seconds, and the
person is still employed come Monday (with a good laugh to share with
coworkers).

~~~
CamperBob2
Even with at-will employment in the US, when someone gets fired it often comes
at the end of a lengthy and combative process. Picking up the last straw may
not bring the proverbial camel back to life, if your manager was already
looking for an excuse to get rid of you.

------
wodenokoto
A typical Google April 1st joke is a product announcement (Google Japan hit
the front page with theirs earlier) but this one is the opportunity for users
to prank other users (and easily doing it by mistake)

Since users are quite good at doing everything you don't want them to do, this
create great opportunities for mistakes and abuse.

------
CM30
Laughter definitely scales. I mean, how many other tech companies did April
Fools Day jokes yesterday? Tons of them, yet it's mostly Google that's getting
the criticism for messing up here.

Google's problem was this joke was forced on people, even when they weren't in
a mood to make any jokes. If it was an optional button to the right, or
activated by some other means that wasn't 'click a button that many people
used, or sometimes have it wotk automatically', then people wouldn't be
complaining about it.

------
jkot
Some jokes are not scalable. Funny cats on youtube are scalable.

------
swiley
This is why web apps are bad. (among other reasons) The UI can change for any
reason without you knowing and with no way to stop it.

~~~
sergiosgc
That is also why they are good. The UI will change and evolve and perfect,
without you thinking about it.

\--

Glass half-full kind of guy.

~~~
swiley
Hahaha. I don't think I've ever used a single web app where the UI got better
over time. Perhaps hn is the only exception.

------
anotherevan
For me, the best April Fools’ joke was when GitHub added SVN support[1]. It
was funny, ironic, useful, and best of all, real. I always think of it as the
April Fools’ joke that keeps on giving.

[1] [https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-
support](https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support)

------
amelius
Does anybody know of a book containing a good analysis of humor? I'm wondering
if there is some structure to be found in the things we find funny.

~~~
js8
Not sure if it's what you're asking for, but I found
[http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-
Engin...](http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-
Engineer/dp/0262518694) interesting.

------
Apocryphon
Between Gmail being announced an April 1st, and Apple being founded on
another, maybe the best way to celebrate this day is with the truth.

------
keyle
That highlighted quote really nailed it deep for me. I've felt that network
effect on twitter for many people.

------
draw_down
Everyone should just stop this shit. I too enjoyed these things years ago, but
not anymore. There are too many now, but it also seems a bit sneakier or more
malicious now than it used to, the Gmail thing is a great example. And it just
seems de rigeur rather than fun or funny.

------
gragas
>and, sometimes, if you’re a woman, by a miscellany of invasive threats

What the heck? I'm not a woman, so apparently no one can threaten me on the
internet?

Sure women probably receive far more internet threats, but we should use
language to reflect _that_ , rather than outright lying and trivializing all
the instances where men were threatened.

~~~
iopq
Actually, men receive just as many Internet threats, but they tend to ignore
them, while women tend to take them seriously.

------
tigershark
I can't imagine the overall impact, I guess that the child that pushed this
"feature" is sweating a lot right now.

------
grahamburger
I'd say the popularity of sitcoms (in the US at least) proves that comedy
scales pretty well as long as you don't stray from the formula. (Bump, set,
spike!)

------
gexla
Bad move on Google's part. But I would think by now people would be used to
seeing media being inserted into a free service. If you want to get rid of the
ads, get a paid service.

