LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #72:
HALF OF THE WORKFORCE WILL NOT RETURN TO THE OFFICE
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
The downturn of office culture was palpable for years. Driven mostly by tech companies and their culture of individual autonomy and embracement with new kinds of collaboration, companies in all industries were beginning to experiment with Home Office schemes or dislocated teams to attract new talent or be able to recruit globally.
And now, the Covid-19 crisis that sees huge parts of the global office population switching to work from home, accelerates this trend and propels us 4 to 5 years into the future.
WFH is here, and it is here to stay. In a new report, Owl Labs claims that nearly half of the people working from home during the crisis will not return to their jobs if that would mean the have to spend all their time in office.
The office has its place, because for some types of work, it is highly beneficial if people are in the same physical location (workshops, ideation, and similar group activities). Checking EMails is not one of those.
The trouble so many organisations have is switching to Remote settings. If you simply copy what you’re doing in the office (I call that fallacy Office Skeuomorphism), things will not really work out well.
Determining what you’re typing by watching your shoulders move
Hey, and since we’re on the topic of Remote: Zoom calls, right? Did you know that it’s possible to guess what you’re typing based on your shoulder movements?
As Bruce Schneier says- the amazing thing is not the accuracy (which is not great), but that it’s possible at all.
One billion worth of dormant bitcoin just moved
The strange thing about bitcoin (and other, blockchain based crypto-currencies) is that the content of “wallets” (currency stashes) are public, but the ownership of such a wallet might be unknown.
There are some famously big wallets out there, sometimes very old (by modern standards), and one of the biggest ones got emptied, its contents completely moved to a different wallet.
That’s significant, because the contents of the wallet summed up to nearly 1 billion USD.
Was it a hack? Did the owner get active again?
UX improvements are diminishing
I’ve written about some paradoxes surrounding A/B-Testing UX improvements before: The longer you test and try, the more insignificant your tests will be.
This is partly true because your first couple of iterations will deal with the “low hanging fruits”, big changes that are easily implemented. As time goes by, improvements will be harder and harder to achieve, and finally, will result in change without any improvement. (Think “marginal gains” here)
The same is true to the industry as a whole, says the Nielsen Norman Group, who found out that the average improvements to UX shrink over time, from 247% improvement of score between 2006 and 2008 to just 75% in 2020.
The reason, they argue, is not that we’ve become bad at our jobs, but on the contrary, we’ve become so good at designing User Experiences that it’s hard to still find ways to improve our projects.
The world smallest readable font
An old friend of mine used to create skins for Winamp. As a part of that, he got really good at creating microfonts: Typefaces that create well-readable text with a limited amount of pixels, often without any antialiasing or sub-pixels available. He did a really good job, and I often wondered how small a font might get and still be readable. Now I know, at least for the standard ASCII-character set: 3x3 pixel.
The world smallest office suite
I did not know about, did you?
““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD”
(Source:https://xkcd.com/327/)
What you see above is not only an attempt to inject a malicious script into a website. It’s also a great prank played by an UK-based company, who decided that this HTML-fragment would be a great company name.
If you retrieve the company name from your database, and insert it into a website (for, let’s say, a list of all registered companies in the UK) without modifying the characters (something called “escaping” a string), that said website would automatically load a script from the website https://mjt.xss.ht.
Guess who did that? The official UK company registrar service. So they made the company change its name to “THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD”That’s it for this edition of Let’s be Fwends. High-fives to everyone out here taking care of their fellow humans instead of building bombs. 🤕
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