DOET (neé Psychology of Everyday Things) deeply influenced me. Articulated things I had observed, experienced. Expanded my thinking.
I was using, teaching, and developing for AutoCAD at the time. Knew nothing about UI beyond my intuition. Just perplexed by how difficult it was for most to use.
Reflecting back, Norman's treatment of mental models and kinds of errors were the most impactful, evergreen design challenges I faced.
> You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business
Some fraction of consumers are duped. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many knockoffs.
If I enter Acme Orbital Thrusters into a search engine, the exact match, their actual website, must be the top hit. Otherwise it's a racket, not a search engine.
What if Acme Orbital Thrusters is a long-running, covered-up fraudster? Why should they get to automatically outrank sites exposing their crimes?
Or what about when there are multiple trademarks for different goods and services from different companies that are all exact matches for the search terms?
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
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Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
Also, always reminds me of Kermit singing "...you make bath time so much fun!..."
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