Why do products sometimes label things as my stuff, and sometimes label things as your stuff?

Interesting post by John Saito on the use of different points of view in user interfaces.

Self-driving cars went viral again recently, when Tesla dropped a $2,500 software update on its customers that promised a new “autopilot” feature. The videos are fascinating to watch, mostly because of what’s not happening. There’s one, titled “Tesla Autopilot tried to kill me!” where a guy drives with his hands off the wheel for the first time. He hasn’t replaced driving with, say, watching a movie or relaxing—instead, he’s replaced the stress of driving with something worse. (…)

Somewhere in between where we stand now, annoyed at how much time we waste sitting in traffic, and the future, where we’re driven around by robots, there will be hundreds of new cars. Their success doesn’t simply depend on engineering. The success depends on whether we, the people, understand what some new button in our brand-new car can do. Can we guess how to use it, even if we’ve never used it before? Do we trust it? Getting this right isn’t about getting the technology right—the technology exists, as the Tesla example proved so horribly. The greater challenge lies in making these technologies into something we understand—and want to use.

Great piece about one of the most compelling questions around the advent of self-driving cars: how do we build trust in a machine?

Although the actual implementation of the 3D Touch is somewhat problematic, the approach taken to the functionality assigned to this feature is the correct one: 3D Touch should be an enhancement to the user experience, not a requirement to achieving a user task. Indeed, so far, all the functionality provided by 3D Touch, whether in quick actions or peek-and-pop mode, is redundant: users who don’t have the latest iPhone or have trouble with the 3D Touch can still do their tasks without using it and achieve the same kinds of actions, albeit in a more roundabout way. This redundancy is the right solution to the problems that gestures pose: lack of affordance and memorability, as well as difficulty in performing them.

Great in-depth analysis of 3D Touch by Raluca Budiu, Nielsen Norman Group. Adding a whole new dimension of interaction can be a double-edged sword, but Apple seems to have nailed it by encouraging the adoption of microsession-oriented patterns focused on efficiency, like “Quick Actions” and “Peek and Pop”.