Friday picks: verification fiddles, UX stuff, spooky stories and the birth of the internet

Here are a few things that have grabbed my attention in the past couple of weeks that you might enjoy exploring on Friday afternoon.

Fake musicians and the gaming of verification

For ProPublica Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis have been digging into a complex scheme for getting verified on Instagram and thus boosting your profile. All you need to do is pretend to be a musician:

“To his more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Dr. Martin Jugenburg is Real Dr. 6ix, a well-coiffed Toronto plastic surgeon posting images and video of his work… But on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, and in roughly a dozen sponsored posts scattered across the web, Jugenburg’s career and controversial history was eclipsed by a new identity. On those platforms, he was DJ Dr. 6ix, a house music producer who’s celebrated for his ‘inherent instinctual ability for music composition’ and who ‘assures his followers that his music is absolutely unique.’

This fascinates me. It’s not as if there isn’t work involved here, or money, and it proves that little check mark has real-world value.

It’s also proof that spammers can and will stink up almost any platform in pursuit of even the slightest gain.

A library of design systems

A colleague on my current project with the NHS introduced me to Component Gallery , a comprehensive archive of design systems from private and public bodies around the world.

Need to know how others have handled star ratings? Or tabs? Or progress bars? There are multiple examples of each, often with detailed notes about the user research that informed them.

I also love how clean and easy to navigate the site is.

Users perceive value if forced to wait

I’m not a product or service designer so there’s loads of stuff those people take for granted that is totally mind-blowingly new to me.

For example, chatting to my colleague Erik Aremyr in the pub this week, I learned about fake progress meters – and why they’re a good thing.

The idea is that if you give users a result instantly they’ll question its validity: “Well, that was fast. Aren’t you even going to think about it?”

So UX people sometimes put in a false delay, e.g. a pulsing orb or ticking clock, to imply that great machinery is running complex calculations behind the scenes.

You can read more about this in Stephen P. Anderson’s 2013 blog post ‘Wait for it…’ which uses Ticket to Ride, a game I’ve played, as an example:

“The app could simply show you final scores for the game, but it doesn’t. What would be the fun in that? A quick reveal would kill the experience. Instead, you get a stirring, climactic end to a game you’ve invested a good deal of your time playing… This is an experience designed to engage my emotions.”

Something to read

I’ve recently enjoyed a selection of short story ‘chapbooks’ from NightJar Press . Each has a single piece of fiction at the literary end of spooky.

They’re a few quid each, printed in limited runs of 200 copies, and each one is signed by the author.

I particularly recommend ‘The Country Pub’, about how unsettling strange inns can feel, and ‘Medlar’, about growing up under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper.

Something to watch

It’s helpful sometimes to be remembered how far we’ve come and how fast. This clip from the marvelous BBC Archive introduced British TV viewers to something called ‘The Internet’ in 1994.