This week on The Deep Dive: Good UX design is in the eye of the beholder, American kids got hooked on phonics then off and now they’re back on again, the endless character development of Daphne from Scooby-Doo, how to dress when no one will tell you the rules, and 30 years since cold fusion and we still have to go to the gas station.

TECHNOLOGY

Chinese app design: weird, but it works. Here’s why by Phoebe Yu (10:51)

This week’s newsletter features two 11-minute videos and two one-hour-long videos because I apparently have no sense of balance. But this was exactly the rundown I needed on Chinese mobile app design and why it seems to confuse so many Americans like myself, who would seemingly rather spend time trying to decipher the meaning of the minimalist menu item images on the bottom of the dozens of entirely separate apps we use per day. But imagine if everything you ever needed was available on a single app with all the information you need presented right there in front of you, like the packaging on an early-2000s Microsoft product. In this video, Phoebe Yu explains how culture and the aesthetics we’re accustomed to influence how we perceive good design and a positive user experience.

EDUCATION

Why everyone stopped reading. by Jared Henderson (11:03)

Young people today don’t know how to read. I’m not talking about the post-pandemic rhetoric that’s essentially a combination of acknowledging that children missed out on years of important in-classroom instruction thanks to the pandemic, and the age-old “kids these days” trope that adults never seem to realize they’re participating in the same way their parents did. In this video, Jared Henderson is talking about college students, even those attending elite schools, who made it to their thirteenth year of education without ever being required to read an entire book. In an environment where students historically are expected to read about one book per week, this can be a problem. What happened? In short, the death of phonics and the rise of standardized tests created the perfect conditions for abysmal reading stamina. Also phones.