A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff.
Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee.
Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients.
The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.
Marriotts are sadly not the same between countries, and that's probably a good thing.
The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much, much lower than everywhere else in the world. Full-service Hiltons in the US don't even have executive lounges anymore.
Some (at least one) don't even have breakfast facilities...
this is true for fast food as well. mcdonalds in poland and spain were MUCH better than the slop in america. I had taco bell here in srilanka recently. it was DELICIOUS and tasted like real food. same goes for popeyes and pizza hut here. pizza hut in america on the other hand tastes regrettable and left me feeling like shit.
It used to be the new, western chain that you only saw in American movies, and then you could experience it for yourself. When I was a kid (middle / solid working class family), we'd semi-regularly do mcDonalds trips as a treat. The experience of going to mcDonalds because you were too poor to do anything else was unthinkable to us.
Other brands that are staples of the American experience were also like this. CocaCola definitely comes to mind here; most of our tapwater is drinkable, and bottled water is much cheaper than coke, so that was the default option for most people, along with coffee and tea of course.
Somebody did the calculations on Polish Twitter recently, and apparently taking a 4-person family to Pizza Hut in the early 2000s used to cost more than our average daily wage.
And yes: I talked to them.
Good pizza in Italy, goos ramen in Japan, grilled Picanha in Brazil, that's why you go there and want it different/original.
But in software UI this is often overdone. I want the pizzazz in my audio software in what it produces, not in how the UI looks like.
In other countries the do have a lot of additional meals which are specific to their local taste (rice/fried chicken/different sauces) but the core burgers like a Big Mac, mcChicken and sides such as fries are there.
Besides the bun, it is noticeable in every part. The amounts and quality of the sauce, vegetables, and meat. And finally how the burger is presented.
So if this difference can occur within 1000km of each other in the same continent, I fully accept that it is even more varied in the whole world.
Thatis, if you happen to go to a random McD in some country and the big mac was great that day and you go to a different restaurant in a different country on a different day and the big mac was bad, then that difference has likely least to do with them being in different countries. It's not like they actually use different recipes.
What made these Delphi programs so unique in their UIs?
Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.
I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
You generally won't get to know someone well enough to appreciate their unique aspects unless you see them in person at least sometimes, unless that person has the habit of letting their freak flag fly in all circumstances, which has its own downsides.
Then don‘t. My boss didn’t require me to put a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn’t turn on my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which I consider fun in fact).
Real design would be changing how beds, showers, toilets, keys, etc etc work.
Yes there is familiarity in the truly banal, but progress in design happens when we really question how things work.
That's [design] engineering.
Rather than aesthetics/ergonomics. Like writing your own widgets in JS, generally a bad idea.
Canonical UX patterns are generally beneficial and most 'design' attempts are well-meaning dark patterns.
Xerox figured out windows, scroll bars, buttons, groups in the 1970s and most web interfaces are STILL not up to that standard!
Heck - they're not as good as Visual Basic apps from the 1990s.
Largely due to lack of design discipline.
I travel 300 days a year work for and stay in hotel apartments, and I still miss the Hyatt I stayed in Manchester in 2021… last place I stayed that had gotten everything right.
“Intuitive Equals Familiar,” a classic from Jef Raskin, the man who started the Macintosh¹ project at Apple:
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
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¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.
More accurate to say that he was forced out. We (Mac nerds) were shocked when he came back. My father told me that I was super excited talking about his return, though I don't remember that. I do remember having a Mac Addict magazine with SJ portrayed as a priest on his return. Internet Archive ftw.[0]
0. https://ia601204.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....
When there is a boardroom battle over control, I think almost any take is fair. Sculley kicked him off Macintosh. Steve then tried to oust Sculley, who gave him a "window seat."
Sculley had the Board's support, and Steve resigned rather than quietly sit in the corner playing with "New Product Development" toys. The Board refused to accept his resignation and encouraged him to rescind it, but no they didn't give him meaningful authority, so he carried on to Plan B and negotiated the right to make "Education" computers.
Did he jump? Was he pushed? Yes!
And back to the point I was making... His trajectory had something in common with Raskin's trajectory, right down to raising money from Canon.
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p.s. Fellow OG Mac developer here. I still have the SE/30 I used to write a classified ads app for QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker back in the day. I would describe classified ads software in the 90s as, "faster horses about to be eclipsed by automobiles."
Unfortunately, Airbnb itself have turned into an IKEA showroom experience …
The real world analog is this...
The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get.
On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.