Bias for impact

One of the things I love about working at PostHog is that one of our core values is Bias for impact.

If you want to make a change to posthog.com, there's no linear process you have to follow. You don't need approval from a specific person. Anyone can see your proposed changes and merge them at anytime.

It's a great example of this core value in action.

As a designer, I want to keep the bar high for our website. (As the self-described webmaster of posthog.com, I have to continually tend to the site's design and messaging if I want to maintain the title.)

Many updates I make on the PostHog website go through some stage of wireframe or mockup. This is because I very deliberately want to craft copy, tone, layout, and design – because we believe it makes a difference.

But this desire inherently conflicts with the value, Bias for action. When less design-oriented people make changes, you can't always maintain your level of quality.

But for me, that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

When someone goes to the effort to create a pull request against the posthog.com GitHub repo, it shows they believe the change was important enough that they didn't ask someone else to do it - they took it upon themselves.

I recently discovered a change to some content on our Book a demo page that sort of threw off the layout of the page, but it was still a good change.

Our Book a demo page

I spent a long time iterating on our demo request flow. In the end, this is the page you'd react after clicking a "Book a demo" link.

This page reflected a lot of work to distill down exactly who needed demos and for what. In my eyes, it was perfectly balanced and exactly accomplished the mission.

But over time, as we grew our go-to-market team, someone eventually added a demo type and changed the page. This meant stuffing in a button in a place where I might not generally ever put a button.

The page now looks like this:

Gone was my perfectly symmetrical page, and in was a third call to action. More buttons to read, more places the eyes need to travel, more decisions for the user to make.

But it's okay, because it solved a problem.

A reflection on a favorite moment in my career

A decade ago, I co-founded a B2B SaaS company. My co-founder was the developer and I designed and some front end code.

When we added a new feature, he would throw data on a sparse page, and it was my responsibility to figure out how to present that information. I loved this delineation of roles, because we had a shared vision and allowed each other to do what we were good at.

With many companies, to make a change to your website, you have to get a lot of buy-in - and that's if you have any say at all. After you get buy-in, you might have to talk to a product manager or run it by marketing or design. PostHog is different.

I love it when my colleagues make changes to the website. Anything they change to the website has our customers interests in mind. And even better for both of us: I don't end up slowing us down.

To me, it's not the end of the world if a button looks out of place for a few weeks. If it solves a purpose, it's a good change, and that will always be more important than perfectly consistent design. Like in my startup, I'll always be here to follow behind them and polish things up afterwards.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some buttons to redesign.

Dear Android design team: Please stop making things worse

Designers always want to leave their mark. I get it. You want to have something to be remembered by.

This is no different within Google. Android has been significantly improved in recent years. It's finally on par with iOS design. (And it only took a decade and a half!)

But there's a point where designers start redesigning things that weren't broken, and we've hit that point. Moreso, they're actually making things worse.

Exhibit A: Redesigning the dialpad

This new feature provides transcripts when calling businesses, among other features. But they reduced the keypad to a single row that overflows off the screen. Now, choosing a menu prompt above the number 4 requires an additional gesture and cognitive overhead of having to learn a new UI, vs the tried and true traditional keypad arrangement. (The number "1" also comes before "0", which is a different pattern than a normal dialpad.)


Exhibit B: Buttons that change shapes?

The goal is to get creative with the active state, but this adds nothing and is a weird one-off in the entire OS.

Exhibit C: Random square buttons

Somebody decided it would be fun to make the primary CTA button a rounded square. I fail to see what was wrong with the round buttons they've been using. But hey, a designer's gotta design, right?


Exhibit D: Removing the wifi Quick Settings tile

Arguably the biggest annoyance in all of Android 12 is the removal of the option to toggle wifi on and off. It was so elegant. Need to toggle wifi? One swipe, one tap. Done. That's all it took!
But our great overlords at Google decided they would fix something that wasn't broken and combined it with Cellular data into a new "Internet" tile. So now when your wifi is spotty and you want to turn it off, you must swipe down from top, tap the Internet tile at the top of the screen, then head to the very bottom to toggle wifi, then tap Done. Great, right?

This change has received so much backlash by users that a Google Community Manager had to defend it in the forums, and there's even a post on how to root your phone to bring it back.

This was supposedly done to help you remember to turn wifi back on? Not really sure how this solves anything. Other users tend to agree, and Google has been getting ripped in comments:

"The Internet panel solves nothing, at least not the "problem" you are describing. If you use the internet panel to switch from WiFi to Cellular Data, how does that make it more likely that the user will remember to switch back to WiFi. You've made the experience much more unpleasant to switch between the two that it is probably more unlikely a user will manually switch back to WiFI.Why does Google feel like it has to fix things that are not broken? What used to be easy and intuitive is now difficult. I hate the Internet panel. Adding it to the lock screen will also not help anything. Since when do users want to switch back and forth when their phone is locked?"
"I'd like to see some hard numbers on who wants this change, or what your user study really showed."

Exhibit E: Making Quick Settings tiles harder to use

For those not familiar with Android, you can swipe down from the top of the screen to access Quick Settings. Before Android 12, you'd have six customizable options at a single tap. Android 12 reduces this to four options. An additional swipe down reveals four more tiles with extra info nobody really needs.

Google decided to add a subtitle to each tile, with information you don't really need. Color already indicated whether an option was on or off. Now many of the tiles list out whether they're on or off. This seems like a great option, but provides little value to anyone after their first week on Android. I don't need text to tell me my flashlight is off, my hotspot is off, my auto-rotate is off, airplane mode is off, bluetooth is on, and that my night light turns on at sunset.

This screen is now harder to scan, harder to find the options I'm looking for, and requires more swipes to access options.
This was a worthless change that solves no real problems for anyone who uses Android on a frequent basis, which tends to be everyone who has a phone.

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Like I said, designers gotta design, but maybe we can find real problems to solve instead of alienating loyal users by changing things that weren't broken just to leave a mark.

Facebook’s community standards censorship has far-reaching consequences

Update: After some retweets about this issue, my domain is finally unblocked. (More details at the end of this post.)

Facebook censorship has effectively barred my business from their platform and is materially impacting the livelihood of my customers.

For the past decade, I’ve run an online portfolio business on the side called FolioHD. (You get a subdomain on the platform to host your portfolio, like mine at watilo.foliohd.com.) The entire foliohd.com domain has been banned from Facebook and Instagram because someone shared something that Facebook didn't like.

Unfortunately I have no insight into the offending content, and the offending content can be anything from a nipple to now apparently even a MAGA hat.

Now I am personally blocked on Instagram from liking photos or sending DMs. I can’t sign into my company Instagram account. And Facebook has reached into my Page’s support inbox, removed private message between myself and customers, and has blocked my website's integrations to import photos from Facebook's and Instagram's APIs.

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