Hijacking this comment to share another alternative: the app Balance (https://www.balanceapp.com/) has really great sleep meditation, a bit similar to Yoga Nidra. They're currently running a promo where you can choose how much you pay for your first year (incl. a free option). I've tried a lot of Youtube/Spotify before and Balance works better for me. Plus doesn't come with the risk of being blasted awake by the next video/song/ad when I forget to set a sleep timer.
They also have excellent meditation for naps, where you can set how long you want to nap before they wake you up.
Circuit | Fully remote company | GMT +/-4 | Senior Product Designer & Design Lead
Last-mile delivery is one of the fastest growing industries and is quickly becoming a default part of everyday life - and yet is still running on outdated software that fails at delivering an acceptable user experience. Missed deliveries, unhelpfully vague time windows, packages that get lost or stolen, no communication between recipients and drivers,...
We're fixing this by creating better tools for everyone involved: drivers, courier companies, and recipients. By getting everyone on the same platform we create the transparency and communication needed to remove all this waste in the industry, and unlock last-mile delivery that's fast, reliable, affordable, and user friendly.
We're fully remote since day 1, not VC-funded, run a small and efficient team (just ~20 employees) and have profitably grown to 15M ARR over the last 4 years.
We're currently 2 designers, and are looking to bring another Product Designer and a Design Lead on board:
This is only true if we pretend that UI design is largely about button-level optimization. Clearly it needs to work on the macro level as well, and it's not farfetched to assume that optimizing every button, icon and text label for their individual local maxima will result in an application that's overall too cluttered for anyone but the most experienced users.
This is not a binary thing. There is such a thing as an interface that is clean and uncluttered, while still using icons that are at least distinguishable from each other. Otherwise you get none of the benefits of an uncluttered interface -- e.g. you have to hover by each button and read the tooltip to find the right one, which is precisely the kind of thing a clean interface is meant to avoid in the first place.
Also, Blender is not a grocery list app. While disregarding novice users does result in an application that's impossible to learn and that's obviously bad, it's equally unproductive to optimize an interface for people who see it for the first time. Blender is the kind of application that you spend tens, if not hundreds of hours learning before using it productively (let alone professionally). That's the target audience you're designing for, not people who download it and uninstall it if they get bored in the first thirty seconds.
Sure, my comment is in response to the claim that monochrome icons are user-hostile and pushed by a cargo-culting UX profession.
Plenty of professional tools (Photoshop, Final Cut, Figma) have monochrome icons without it being a usability issue. These are all content creation tools, including Blender. The UI and content should not be fighting for attention. It's clear which of those two should primarily be on display.
I think it's entirely possible that Blender just has poor icons - but it seems demonstrably false that monochrome icons are inherently inaccessible.
My best guess is that Blenders real issue is a lack of structure and clear grouping. Providing the icons are in a logical place, it's easy enough to find the correct one, without them needing to be visually distinct on literally every dimension. But if there's no logic to the placement and the icon you're looking for could be one of thirty, then I agree that's an usability issue - just not that the icons are at fault.
The implication here is that money spent on ads is largely wasted.
Companies like Uber and Ebay have turned off all their adspend and saw little to no change in their acquisition metrics. You can argue that they were just doing it wrong. But the point is that, if even they are doing it wrong - and getting nothing in return for the millions they're spending on ads - then it's very likely most others are in the same situation.
You are right that this doesn't mean _all_ advertising is useless, there are absolutely profitable usecases. But the larger points still stands: most money being spend on advertising right now is likely not returning anything.
We now have some strong precedents being set. I believe this will cause more major companies to run the ultimate experiment: turn off all ads and see what happens. It's too early to tell, but it's not impossible we'll see adspend drop significantly across the industry once everyone finds out they're just burning money.
Why the ad spend isn't working is a critical detail. It's definitely not most money but yes there's a lost of waste because it's a 12 figure industry with lots of politics, perverse incentives, thousands of vendors, and a complex global supply chain.
Fraud is a special case because it's criminal activity and has nothing to do with advertising. It happens in every industry but it's especially easy with online technology spanning multiple countries and data that can be easily faked. Uber was exceedingly oblivious here but I wouldn't extrapolate advertising efficacy from these examples.
In case you're considering taking this further: a Figma plugin for this would make it 10x better. Changing the seed color could automatically update the color styles in the file, and would so propagate to every component and element. That would make an incredibly useful tool for experimenting with color schemes.
I coded a beta plugin for Figma. I don't know how to contact you, but if you read this comment, please DM on Tweeter at @manceraio so I can share it with you!
