I think a lot of us have grown to regard software-update notifications as annoyances. We’re already besieged by unwanted popups and windows ordering us to stop whatever we’re already doing and do what some external entity wants us to do. Apple’s update notifications, you can’t even turn off; part of my morning ritual is swiping away the stupid “Update iOS” notification that shows up every night.
It’s unfortunate things turned out this way. Software updates are generally a good thing. It means the software is being supported and improved. Free software updates are even better. The fact that these announcements feel similar to dickovers is, as usual, down to poor—or, perhaps, maliciously self-serving1—UI design.
Gifts are presented, not thrown in someone’s face. Software updates are a gift. Developers should put more effort into treating them this way.
I’m thinking of Apple here, whose spammy notifications for new operating systems (I consider these ads) cannot be turned off, forcing users who don’t want them to come up with convoluted, albeit very clever, workarounds. Why doesn’t Apple let you turn these off? Presumably because they want high upgrade statistics they can brag about.
Apple would probably counter by saying that software upgrades benefit users. That is my decision to make, not Apple’s. When a company doesn’t let me turn something off, I assume that whatever it is exists primarily for their benefit, not mine.
Absolute gold from John Gruber, who coined the term dickover for something we have to see every day: popup modals.
I don’t need to go into why dickovers are gross. If you’ve seen one, you already know. The reasons are self-evident. But the core of why this junk isn’t just annoying but offensive—at least to me—lies in the mindset behind them. The people who deface their websites with dickovers are demanding something they have not earned yet: My desire to keep hearing from them.
Imagine meeting someone in real life and within ten seconds of small talk, they literally interrupt you mid-sentence to bluntly demand your contact information. You’re not going to promptly hand it over, excited at the possibility of long, meaningful conversations with your wonderful new friend. You’re going to stare at this person, awkwardly excuse yourself, and walk away thinking, Well, that was creepy.
I have never, once, joined a newsletter because of a popup ad (and yes, “plz join my mailing list” boxes qualify as ads). Why would I? I don’t know yet if this is someone I want to keep hearing from, and now they’ve given me a pretty powerful push in the opposite direction.
And when I do sign up for a newsletter—which I do, constantly—it’s because, after having taken a good long look at whatever is there, I find the work genuinely interesting. Often, like if someone posts about an ongoing personal project that sounds useful, I’ll go to their site with the existing intention of signing up. If I want your newsletter, I’ll find it. A static box at the end of an article, or placed in a footer, is fine.
And if I don’t want your newsletter, getting pushy about it is not going to shift things in your favor. Let’s be clear: A dickover is, fundamentally, an attempt at cheating. You’re trying to hustle a process that can’t be rushed, fast-tracking a connection with me not because you actually did something to deserve it, but just because you got in my face and demanded it.
Marketing ghouls who deal in terms like “growth hacking” will point to numbers that justify this approach. 1 Normal humans don’t care about your spreadsheets. They care about how you treat them, and they think entitled, pushy behavior is gross.
That’s another reason why I would advise anyone enamored with dickovers to reconsider that approach. Dickovers give the rest of us an impression of you—you personally—that does not reflect well on you. Impressions matter, and not just the ones in Google Analytics.
I’ve always believed that the things we create are inexorable reflections of who we are. How could they not be? The work we do, especially for ourselves, is unavoidably infused with our values, decisions, and personality; our psychological DNA.
Dickovers, like the popup-window ads you might remember from yesterday’s web, are a shabby, tasteless hack that indicates something about the decision-maker who chose to implement them. You’re knowingly giving your visitors—people who provide you with attention, patronage, and possibly even friendship/employment—a decidedly disrespectful experience, for your own benefit. That’s not cool.
Dickover apologists will engage in some hair-splitting at this point, trying to quantify—i.e. minimize or justify—the “bad experience” aspect vs. the revenue/benefits from juiced subscription stats. Again, they’re missing the point, in a way that only someone who understands data but not people will do. If someone spits in your face, you don’t care that it’s a small amount and wipes off easily enough. What you care about is that they spat in your face.
I lose respect (and, frankly, trust) for people and organizations who resort to things like that, and I’m a lot less interested in continuing to hear from someone who I have reason to not respect. Moreover, I’m also uninterested in having any kind of relationship, even a superficial one-way one, with someone who doesn’t respect me.
Gruber:
It’s a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover. It is no different from snatching a physical copy of a book or magazine out of a reader’s hands in order to badger them for something other than the attention they were already granting your work, except that the physical act of snatching a publication from a reader’s hands would subject you to being punched in the face.
If people habitually treated each other the way websites habitually treat us, there would be fistfights.
Numbers which may not actually justify that approach as much as you think. Gruber points out that stats can’t accurately convey the subsequent consumer hostility that results from overtly disrespectful behavior: “They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.” ↩
25 years ago today, Steve Jobs revealed the new face of macOS: Aqua.
I didn’t see that demo, but I remember the moment I first saw Aqua. My dad showed me some screenshots in the New York Times one evening. I couldn’t stop looking at it—I’d never seen anything like it. I’d been fascinated with user interface #design for years at that point, and it hadn’t occurred to me that a computer could look like that. (I was still in high school.)
Former #Apple engineer James Thomson remembers that moment for a different reason: he was responsible for a pretty visible piece of Mac OS X. The Dock was one of the most notable new pieces of UI furniture in Mac OS X, replacing the top-right Finder menu that let you switch between active programs and making it a lot easier to get to your most frequently used apps. If anything melted down when Steve was showing off the Dock, Thomson’s name was on it.
The Aqua screenshots I saw were not from that demo, since I remember the Dock looking like the Dock we know: icons sitting on top of the white pinstriped background, rather than each icon having its own background. (I distinctly remember the magnification effect.) Nevertheless, the pre-Public Beta dock was interesting in its own right. Anyone who’s familiar with NeXTSTEP will recognize the influence.
I always enjoy these little flickers of how things happened behind the curtain, but I’m especially fascinated by the stories behind mundane things—the unglamorous Apple designs you barely think about, the so-fundamental-as-to-be-nearly-invisible elements like the Dock. I hadn’t known who designed the Dock (Bas Ording, who’s made a few other significant contributions to Apple UI design, such as text selection and the now-ubiquitous rubber-band effect), or that the Dock was codenamed Überbar, or that it was prototyped in Macromedia Director. I wish there was something like folklore.org for contemporary Apple products.