Issue 104

Busting magic bullet myths

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• New Apple products from the WWDC conference

• Exposing a bunch of myths about neuroscience and human behavior

• The trailer for the new season of Arcane

• A cool tutorial on promting AI

• Free video generator by text promt

• Updated interface design generation tool

• …and much more!

Enjoy reading!

🗞 News and articles

25 Neuroscience Myths. Busting Common Pop Psychology Myths with Scientific Evidence

Adam Palanica exposes popular misconceptions about neuroscience and human behavior. These are often cliches, distorted or distorted by science fiction.

Here are some typical examples:

• The first refuted myth is the widespread belief that we use only 10% of our brain's potential. In fact, our entire brain is used at various degrees of intensity depending on the task being performed

• The misconception about the existence of "male" and "female" brains. Adam points out that there are no significant structural or functional differences between male and female brains and individual differences within each sex are more pronounced than any differences between the sexes

• The myth that the human brain has an ancient "reptilian brain" under the neocortex that controls subconscious and emotional reactions. The correct point of view is that brains evolved from common ancestors and all vertebrates share the same basic brain regions.

• The belief that each person has a unique learning style, for example, they are visual, auditory or kinesthetic. People tend to learn effectively through a combination of multiple sensory representations of information

• The view that what people say and what they do are always significantly different is also refuted. The article points out that there is often a very consistent relationship between what people say and what they do

Hidden vs. Disabled In UX

Vitaly Friedman's memo on when to hide and when to disable functions in the interface.

It is important to show the necessary functions and remove unnecessary ones. If the feature is not available, consider disabling it rather than deleting it, and explain to the user why it is disabled and how to enable it.

However, never hide buttons or key filters by default, as users expect them to be constantly available. Always try to keep the buttons and functions in their original state — accessible and readable.

There’s No Magic Bullet

Chris Chapman writes that user research is not a magic bullet, that it cannot always provide a simple and accurate answer to complex business hypotheses.

Instead of searching for a "magic bullet" that links a specific solution to an excellent result, the author suggests focusing on an accurate and complete assessment of each individual area, such as product quality, user experience and competition. He emphasizes that successful products require the successful completion of many key tasks at the same time and failure in any of them can negatively affect the result.

Decision Trees For UI Components

Vitaly Friedman shows examples of flowcharts for selecting the appropriate UI component for the task. Examples from the teams Doctolib, Workday, Lyft, NewsKit and others.

Such schemes (or decision trees) help to systematically approach the selection of components and avoid endless discussions and misunderstandings.

Mind the Gap

The text and recording of Luke Wroblewski's speech about three breaks in UX. He draws attention to the key problems that prevent companies from giving maximum value to users. He identifies three main gaps: organizational, gap in the essence of the product and its implementation.

Problems with the design of mobile devices, such as intrusive advertising and cookie policy, significantly worsen the user experience, which negatively affects business metrics such as conversions and active users.

Luke sees one of the main reasons that the growth of companies often leads to an increase in the distance between decision makers and end users, which affects the quality of product design. He provides examples of successful user-centric solutions and discusses the importance of spending time with customers to better understand their needs.

A detailed overview of all Android 15 updates

New technologies

Apple hosted the WWDC conference. Among the new products are significant updates to operating systems and the new Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence system (it looks like the company is trying to privatize the abbreviation AI). Let's briefly list the main things.

Apple Intelligence:

Integrated into all the company's operating systems is a universal assistant that understands the user's "personal context". It generates images and emojis, creates and edits texts, and searches for information and content based on queries

It works locally on devices without transferring data to the company's servers

Integration with Siri, improving its capabilities, including support for ChatGPT 4. ChatGPT features are available for free (!!!)

iOS 18:

• You can change the color of the icons, and the control center customization options are expanded

• New quick access features on the lock screen

• A completely redesigned Photo app with smart collections and a new shared feed of pictures

macOS Sequoia:

• Remote control of the iPhone from a computer

• New AI features in Mail, Notes, Safari and Photos apps

• New features in Safari, including automatic highlighting of important information

• Updated Game Porting Toolkit 2 to simplify porting games from Windows to Mac

iPadOS 18:

• New home screen, control center and Photo

• app Calculator app, lol!

• Extended Apple Pencil support in the Notes app, including error correction in handwritten notes

Apple Silicon Chips:

• The new A17 Pro and M-series chips are optimized for working with language models and image generation

• They provide local text and image generation, writing assistant and text search by video

Sam Altman, who entered into a partnership at the same time with two main competitors in bigtech be like: