Blog
Youssef Sarhan
UI/UX/IxD Designer
Yo Dick! • Yo Zuck! • Email • Twitter
-
Back in 2009, when I was a student living in The Netherlands, I was taking a train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam. I started working on my website but I was so tired that I kept falling in and out of sleep; at one point my finger pushed down on the z key as I nodded off.
Just one of those awesome cosmic accidents.
-
This is an amazing documentary. It’s about the American open road and the wanderlust of it’s travelers. It reminds me a lot of when a couple of friends and I went traveling across the united states; and at 1h 30mins, its slow pace allows you to appreciate the American expanse. A must watch!
-
Twitter Classic™
Beautiful, wasn’t it?(Source: uxuiuxui)
-
Sandroid.
-
I resent the Facebook ‘Like’ paradigm
Back in April 2010, following the spawn of the Embeddable Like button Zuckerberg announced they expected 1 billion likes across the web in any given 24 hour period. At the time, Facebook had just 400 million users.
Today Facebook enjoys 800 Million users; I’d guess, very conservatively, that Facebook processes about 2 billion likes a day now.
This is where it gets depressing..
Let’s say it takes just 1 second to click a like button.
2 billion likes per day * 1 second = 2 billion seconds per day.
2 billion seconds equates to… wait for it… 63 years.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 63 years. 1 Like, 2 Likes, 3 Likes, 4… and so on for 63 years.
In most cases it takes much longer than a second; never mind the notifications you’ll continue to receive if there is the slightest degree of activity on the liked content.
Yet here we are celebrating it’s creation.
What were we thinking?
-
1979, Jimmy Carter addresses the people. I resent that thanks to political correctness our politicians lack this degree of practicality. -
Beautifully done.
-
It’s 5:31am and I’m helping Kayak with UX
Update: I mistakenly used Urdu instead of Hindi when translating the word ‘India’, next to the India flag. Thanks anon.When I visit kayak.com everything is displayed in Finnish. However, when I attempt to change the language, it turns out all the other country names are also displayed in Finnish. This is confusing and unhelpful.
In fact, it gets even more confusing. Not only was I put-off by a language I can’t understand, I wasn’t quite sure if it were languages or countries I was selecting as there are two English speaking options on the list, United Kingdom and USA. It took Google Translate to clarify.
I love using Kayak, but I hate this.
Fix it. [See: Above, Right]
—
time to sleep.. z z Z! -
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts by Jonathan Franzen -
Regular Cup. Large Cup. Both filled with a ‘Large’ latte. Go figure.
-
Believe in the start-up
Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, PopCap Games, Populis and LinkedIn all have their European, Middle Eastern and/or Asian headquarters in Ireland.
If only we could convince Irish investors to believe in the start-up.
-
How Facebook has gamified friendship
The Facebook ‘Like’ concept. It is used because it is there and not because it is desired; but this does not necessarily make it bad. So, I took time to explore it further. What is it? What is this new language, the exchange of ‘Liking’ that Facebook has created? ‘Likes’ have become some sort of collectable item and you cannot blame users for that. It feels like a game, maybe it is a game. Facebook has somehow managed to change the relationships between friends into a game. This is detrimental to the institution of friendship; and more importantly Facebook. By diluting the quality of interactions on offer to users, Facebook has fundamentally compromised their value.
Additionally, users have —on average— 130 friends, but you are not quite close enough (naturally!) to comment on the majority of the content they create, so we ‘Like’ what they post. In fact, Facebook encourages this with limited interaction subscriptions. It keeps you in the game, regardless of how well you know your ‘Friends’.
Facebook is illogical and inconsistent; the entire user experience is permeated with issues. However, most profoundly, hours upon hours of precious time are wasted processing the mundane trivia of total strangers See: http://relevancetesting.tumblr.com ; and that’s how Facebook operates. Of course, it is not Facebook’s priority to create a time-wasting heap of code, but alas here we are. This is their business model and they are willing to put $100 billion on it.
It’s rapidly becoming an insult to our intelligence and quite frankly, I think many of us are growing tired of it. I can see a time, not too far from now, when we’ll wonder what we were thinking with that thing called ‘Facebook’. For a company of their size, I am increasingly disappointed with their product. There is so much they could be doing to make FB a beautiful supplementation to life, but no, they are stuck with the junk. It’s a shame really. -
This is why we pose for photographs
I’ve thought about this quite a bit; I’ve taken time to research it and I’ve even talked to my Grandmother about her first memories of being photographed. She is now in her 80s, but remembers gathering in front of the lens with her family and extended family —the perfect Kodak moment(!)— at the age of 6. I think, if we take a moment to understand the origins of photography, we may shine a light on the everyday phenomena of posing.
The invention of photography was truly revolutionary; it changed everything. The first photograph is understood to have been produced in 1826. The word produced is key here. Photography as we know it, is incredibly fast, it certainly doesn’t feel produced, it feels organic; but it wasn’t always like that. Photographs weren’t taken 170 years ago, they were produced. The moment was captured over an extended period of time. Wikipedia describes the process:
“… photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea, which then dissolved in white petroleum. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a positive image with light regions of hardened bitumen and dark regions of bare pewter.”
— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography#Monochrome_processThis is an incredibly important piece of information if we want to understand the affect photography had on society; what it required from people in order to bring any value to their lives. If you wished to have your photo produced you needed to pose, hold the pose and wait. It took a long time to capture the light necessary to accurately recreate the scene. In an effort to aid with the posing process a strange but practical invention was created. A clamp to hold the poser’s head and posture still. These were called Posing Stands, no less.
The subject is placed in front of the camera. If necessary, the pose is held with the assistance of adjustable head rests, clamps and posing stands.
— http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/dagprocess.htm
The foot of the posing stand can be glimpsed behind the subjects legs.
— http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/HastingsPhotgrsHiHu.htmSo now we understand why posing was necessary, but we have to ask why it is still necessary when the entire photo-capture can be as quick as 1/2000th of a second.
People are used to posing, they expect it. Posing is a habit that formed from the technological requirements of the past. However, as photos are essentially free we are seeing a lot more candid photography, mostly of objects and scenes, but not of people or faces. The posing tradition also affects a photographers ability to take candid shots of friends or family. You might remember the first time you saw a photo of your side profile. It probably felt strange. “Do I really look like that?” you might have asked. People can feel somewhat violated when somebody takes a candid photo of them, as they did not have the opportunity to ‘prepare’ for the shot; because somehow they think they need to prepare.
Despite the technological advancements of cameras, the idea of posing still applies today; a quick creep around Facebook will illustrate this. I wonder if we would be such chronic posers had cameras been as fast the day they were invented as they are now.
—
Also posted on Quora: Why do we pose for photos? -
-
True story.
