Episode transcription

(Be aware this transcription was done by AI and might contain some mistakes)

Fabrice Neuman (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Human Pulse Podcast where we talk about living well with technology. I'm Fabrice Neuman a tech consultant for small businesses.

Anne Trager (00:09)
And I'm Anne Trager a human potential and performance coach.

Fabrice Neuman (00:13)
This is episode 23, recorded at September 21st, 2025.

Anne Trager (00:18)
Human pulse is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

Fabrice Neuman (00:22)
Alright, so today

I wanted to talk about form over function. It was mainly sparked by the new releases from Apple, mainly the new versions of all their OS's, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and what have you. They all have two main common points. They share the version number, 26, because Apple switched to yearly numbering, and also a new graphic interface called Liquid Glass.

And don't know if you've noticed, but I've been somewhat vocal about how I don't like this interface based on, you know, okay. ⁓ So mainly this interface is based on animated translucency that to my eyes impedes on the legibility of the whole thing. I don't like it. But so the thing is right away when I first used it a couple of months ago, I thought about it.

how so many people mistake ergonomics for how things look instead of for what it really is, which is how things work. And in this instance, the Liquid Glass, it's beautiful, it's shiny at first glance, but then I think it slows down the usage of the device because as I said, it's less legible and also you have to quote unquote wait for some animations even for the simplest.

toggle. And so while some people told me, maybe not in so many words, that it was just an old fart averse to change.

Anne Trager (01:54)
That wasn't me, wasn't me.

Fabrice Neuman (01:56)
No, it wasn't you. And

maybe for the first part it might be true, who knows. Still, you know, I've been using and testing new stuff for a living for more than three decades, so, you know. Anyway, this new... I don't think so either.

Anne Trager (02:10)
Yeah, I don't think that you're very averse to change. Yes, I...

Fabrice Neuman (02:16)
Anyway, me, this new interface plus the new super thin phones like the iPhone Air, that's all the rage, and this Samsung S25 Edge, very thin one as well, seems to show one thing to me, that it becomes more more difficult to draw people's desire to new smartphones. So it's like another demonstration if need be that we are at peak smartphone and new features just don't cut it.

know, manufacturers can only rely now on "ooh shiny" to lure us. And that's what I call form over function.

Anne Trager (02:50)
That makes me think about how adept we are as human beings at getting really excited about the latest and greatest new thing. know, anything that will distract us from the everyday. This is kind of deeply wired, not even kind of, this is deeply wired in us. We're always on the lookout for something new. It's a cognitive bias. It's called the novelty bias. And we actually think, I mean, we do, we all do this, okay? We actually think that new is better.

And I think that big tech and all marketing actually, but big tech in particularly really plays on this, always bringing out new features all the time. I mean, my phone has so many features. I use about three of them. I don't need the however many features there are. I've actually never counted. I don't take the time to do it. I mean, of course I am drawn in to anything new.

because of this bias. I'm just like everybody else. I am not above and beyond that. And still, my patience with learning them or learning whatever is new lasts about two and a half seconds. Not even long enough to get through the little video you get because ultimately I'm the kind of user who just wants my tech to work and I want it to work quickly and I don't want it to disturb my routine. And if my routine is in place, it will...

And it's not working the same way it was before it takes time out of my day. It's like what you were saying, if you know, if it's going to wiggle a little bit before I do something, it will take time out of my day that I don't need to take out of my day. It adds a little layer of friction. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (04:23)
Yeah, yeah.

We

should say still that, you the first time you updated your phone and you saw iOS 26 for the first time and maybe a little bit to come back at me but you said something like, well, it looks nice.

Anne Trager (04:42)
Well, absolutely. It does look nice and I haven't used it long enough to, to, to confront you on your opinion. I don't have an opinion yet. I think it looks nice. ⁓ I'm happy with it looking nice. Okay. However, the day, yeah. However, when it starts getting in the way of my regular usage, I'm going to just get pissed off about it and I will hand it over to you and say, fix this, please make it work.

Fabrice Neuman (04:54)
Yeah, but that's the point.

If I can.

Anne Trager (05:08)
me to work, right? Because that's the kind of user I am and I'm sure I'm not alone on And at the same time, I totally recognize that I love the new and shiny and that I'm just like everybody else. I moved to, you know, I moved over my search from, you know, Google, which works, okay? Well, actually, I was using DuckDuckGo, which still, which works, to the various generative AI models.

because I could and because I wanted to know, you know, this is new or because it's new and what is it going to give me? It's going to, can do it in a different way, a new way with, you know, natural language and I can get different kinds of responses in natural language. Cool.

You know, and I'm just like a lot of people. mean, there's a recent report out from OpenAI that says three quarters of the conversations that take place on OpenAI focus on practical guidance, seeking information. I mean, that search, that's what we did. You know, how do you do this? Okay. And, you know, 49 % of those messages are asking.

They categorize it as asking, doing, expressing. mind you, this is published by OpenAI, so it's probably a little bit biased in one way or another. However, that said, we talked about this already. People are using this new, incredible tool as a glorified search engine. So is this the new shiny object syndrome? Probably. You know, because GenAI studies, so GenAI, say

Fabrice Neuman (06:33)
Yeah, probably. Yeah.

Anne Trager (06:38)
about GEN-AI say that it is absolutely lousy at providing accurate answers. So why do I go to it for answers?

Fabrice Neuman (06:46)
Yeah, I think it's probably the another demonstration of this, you know, balance where there's something new. So we tend to use it a lot and then we go back a bit. for sure, it does not replace a search engine as we know it. So sometimes, you know, we try to replace something and then it just adds on top of the technology we already have. And this is exactly to me

the same thing with ⁓ Gen.ai used as search engines. And you were talking about the lousy answers that sometimes, lot of times, many times, the Gen.ai can give lousy answers. And there was this particularly interesting, I found, study from the NewsGuard And ⁓ they made a

2024 and 2025's answers from different Gen AI. chatbots. ⁓ Let me quote from their website first. They say, so, "False information rate nearly doubles in one year. NewsGuard's audit of the 10 leading generative AI tools and their propensity to repeat false claims on topics in the news reveals the rate of publishing false information nearly doubled.

now providing false claims to news prompts more than one third of the time." quote. we'll put the link in the show notes and everybody can download the story for free just by giving an email address. But so one tidbit I wanted to discuss here on that topic, there's a nice showing some, you know, comparing results

chatbots. I'm not going to give all the numbers because and some of the chatbots I didn't know anyway. But are the percentage of responses containing false information. For example, for Chat GPT in 2024, it was 33 % and in 2025, 40%. So every time it's for the between August 2024 and August 2025.

For Mistral, the French one, it's stable at 36 and 36. Then the first surprise to me was from Gemini, so Google, the king of search. so in 2024, was 6.5 % basically. And in 2025, it was more than then you have, we talked a lot about Perplexity.

which advertised itself as being the king of AI search, saying, we know how to do that. And so in 2024, percentage of responses containing false information was 0%. So good, like even great. But in 2025, it was more than 45%. So all of a sudden, you don't want to use Perplexity to search information on the Web because like almost half the time you're going to

Anne Trager (09:28)
Mm-hmm.

Fabrice Neuman (09:52)
get some of the part of the answer being false information. And the other one I wanted talk about is Claude from Anthropic ⁓ because it's stable at 10 % between 2024 and 2025. So that led me personally to make the switch from ChadGPT to Claude. And ⁓ with the obvious caveat that these numbers are

Anne Trager (10:07)
Hmm.

Fabrice Neuman (10:20)
probably going to change very quickly and probably already have. But I'm going to follow up on, know, and follow NewsGuard because they're going to give us some more information in coming months, I'm sure.

Anne Trager (10:35)
So I think it's really interesting because what that also says is that there's a whole lot more false information out there so that when, and that AI cannot tell the difference.

Fabrice Neuman (10:51)
Yeah, exactly. There was one explanation

given by, think it was Radio Canada. They tried to go deeper into this and tried to explain these numbers. And one of those explanations was the fact

Anne Trager (10:58)
Mm.

Fabrice Neuman (11:10)
Basically in 2024, you could ask those chat bots for questions and they would rely only on their corpus database, what they knew, right? And after that, they were added with feature of being able to search the Web and compile answers and give them to us in those wonderfully written sentences that we liked so much.

And that's where, and so some of the, so we know that the Web is flooded with false information from, you know, nation states and stuff like that. I guess the old nation states do it, but there are some obvious culprits. are not going to talk about them here, but it's a demonstration of how chatbots can sometimes only be good parrots.

Anne Trager (12:03)
Yeah, Well, so, and that's the thing is that the whole notion of truth is becoming, I mean, it's always been a rather dubious idea that we could know the truth of something. I mean, if you really look at it philosophically and so forth. However, now it's like really clear that it's really, really, really, really hard to know the truth about anything. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (12:03)
They repeat, right?

But so it seems that

some tools can do it better than others.

Anne Trager (12:33)
Absolutely. So, Claude, I have to give it a try. I really, you know, I just don't like some of Claude's answers. Not because they contain some truth, but the way it's, they're wordy. But okay, maybe I have to work on my, maybe Claude needs some specific, some specific prompting. Okay, I need to work on.

Fabrice Neuman (12:41)
Hmm.

Well, but this is how

Well,

that's one thing, but then this is where I think it comes back to form over function. I always liked Chat GPT because I think they, I always thought their app and their way of presenting just themselves and the app itself is better. It's a nicer looking app. It's more polished. And so it drew me more to use it than Claude. And Claude is a little slower.

Anne Trager (13:06)
Mm. Yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (13:21)
The voice interaction is only in English and not in French, which is important to me. ⁓ And there's also another tool that I like to use for voice and video interaction. Like for example, I needed to do something in the car and I didn't know where it was. for that, I use Gemini because I think Gemini is better than all the other tools I tried, which is to...

show a video feed to the chatbot and ask it, so tell me what can I do? Where is it? How can I remove this or put it back? know, stuff like that. that for that for me, Gemini is the best. So this is in that regard, form and function. But it also means that for some tasks, Claude is lacking in form, right? So

Anne Trager (14:03)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah. It's so, it's so interesting. Well, and again, it's this, know, if we go back to that whole idea of the shiny new object idea, well, Claude comes in second because it's more about function and that, and really the, the aesthetics are going to draw you in a, at first, and that's pretty well known in, in design.

Fabrice Neuman (14:15)
This is a balance.

Anne Trager (14:34)
Generally speaking, is aesthetics will draw you in first and then afterwards, the function kicks in and it, if it doesn't work, then you're not going to keep trusting it. and so, but I don't want to leave the topic of shiny new yet, because I think it's really important while we are talking about AI to just contemplate how this has impacted decision-making in business. Because.

Fabrice Neuman (14:44)
That's very true.

Anne Trager (15:01)
The whole generative AI thing has come as the shiny new object of the past few years.

There has been $30 to $40 billion in enterprise investment in generative artificial intelligence, which is amazing, in companies and in AI pilots. And the rate, according to MIT's Media Lab, is 95%. 95 % of AI initiatives show zero return.

Fabrice Neuman (15:31)
That's amazing,

Anne Trager (15:36)
so this will certainly change. We're the beginning of the shiny new object. Okay, sure. However, this is really how our decisions are impacted by our cognitive bias. novelty. This is going to change the world. Let's jump right in and do it. Well, maybe, maybe we can step back and think about it. Maybe we can step back and think about things first. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (15:53)
No.

Yeah.

Yeah. And also,

you know, the, the, companies, the seems that a lot of them tried AI because, maybe the competitor is going to do that or the competitor is starting to talk about it. So, why don't we use it? And, and the, all we use like, all go for it. And without really thinking about it, it seems to be the demonstration of

Anne Trager (16:15)
Yeah, yes.

Well, okay. The last time on our last ⁓ podcast, we did make a veiled promise that we were not always going to talk about AI. So let's go back to form factor. Okay. There's a whole, there are a whole lot of other things to talk about when it comes to form factor.

Fabrice Neuman (16:31)
I have... ⁓

Yeah,

yeah, form or function. Yeah, so just to be clear in my introduction, I didn't mean to say that there was no more progress to be made in interface or ergonomics globally. We often mentioned here already that sometimes the smallest of accessories can make the difference, right? The right case for the phone or tablet, the ⁓ right band for your connected watch.

You know, changed mine yesterday and I will change again maybe, you know, in a week or so because it's not exactly perfect. So I keep changing. the thing it seems to me still as a species, we are all looking for radical change, more looking for radical change than for slow evolution, which I think might lead us to miss the big picture, which I would express this way, just like form over function. We are more often.

Anne Trager (17:05)
Bye.

No.

Fabrice Neuman (17:31)
They're not guilty of want over need. And I think it's particularly true in technology. So I do remember many conversations I had on my other podcast in French called iWeek. We talk about ⁓ Apple technology, new products and stuff like that.

Anne Trager (17:34)
For sure, for sure, yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (17:50)
often not fight but you know have like a somewhat heated conversation with my you know co-hosts about you know so maybe it's not that particularly interesting when the new phone is yellow instead of green who cares

Anne Trager (18:04)
And the whole conversation we just had says, well, actually, people do care. Because if you want to sell new phones, you want a new color, because nothing else is really going to be interesting to most people, at least right off the bat. Obviously, that's a gross simplification. And still, that's what it comes down to. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (18:09)
Yes.

Hmm

Anne Trager (18:25)
I think it...

there's a contradiction in what you said.

Because you say that we are more looking for radical change than for slow evolution. And as soon as you bring in radical change to anybody, people don't want to change. They just get so resistant and then they don't change. this is, I deal with people all the time in coaching in ⁓ the context change, you know, is happening all the time in businesses and people don't want to change. And it's really, really hard to get them to change. I'm the same. told you, if it gets in the way of my habits, I don't want to change. I don't want that new feature.

going to get in the way of what I've already set up. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (19:00)
I

agree. guess the radical change, so it depends on the meaning of radical change you choose. I totally agree. It's not the right way to say it. Radical change, was so once again referring to this new interface and so maybe it's a change as radical as we can accept.

Anne Trager (19:21)
Yeah, maybe.

Well, and that too is a really interesting question. And I think designers have a hard job because they're designing for the whole world. And so where you find increased cognitive load with the Liquid Glass, well, for the time being, I haven't noticed that. I'm like, okay. So this is the way it is. yeah, I see a little through. It's kind of amusing, but I'm so not interested in that that I just go about my day.

Fabrice Neuman (19:29)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Anne Trager (19:49)
Whatever. Now, I'm curious, what is the problem that that Liquid Glass was trying to solve? I have no idea. That I haven't figured out. But it is something that when I go into change, it's one of those questions that I think that we can ask when it comes to form. Is the form solving a problem, an actual problem? And then what's the cognitive load that it could bring upon us?

And then there's the other question is, you know, am I going to choose this new things because I want it or because I need it? Very good point, want or need.

so you, your form flop is the Liquid Glass. Okay. Mine is actually, this is going to date me a little bit. It's emojis. ⁓ I mean, emojis, it's a communications tool. So you would think that they were made to improve communication. Right. And I don't, don't, whenever emojis ever improved communications, I mean, really? Do they improve communication? Maybe just.

Fabrice Neuman (20:26)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Anne Trager (20:46)
Not for me, I don't know. I mean, I guess it's that whole text message thing. I was a little slow even to realize that I was being offensive when I put a final period on it. I mean, I kind of like punctuation. so I'm again, I'm being slow to evolve here.

Fabrice Neuman (21:01)
Yeah.

So I also, I think that it might also mean that you're just an old fart like me. It's, you know, it's, so this is generational for sure. The punctuation. So, you know, and we also had this discussion several times with, you know, on our like weekly meeting in TechConnect Europe the M dash being

Anne Trager (21:12)
Okay, okay, okay. I'll own that.

Fabrice Neuman (21:33)
a marker for AI generated text. And I would say that a lot of people don't know what an M dash is anymore, right?

Anne Trager (21:46)
I know it's so sad. used to use

M dashes all the time, one of my favorite punctuation marks ever. And now when I use it, actually talk about cognitive load. I actually put a little thing in and says that M dash is all my own, you know? I mean, cause otherwise I can't use it. I'm so sad about that. Anyway, so anyway, is, is punctuation form or function? Well, actually it's both. So

Fabrice Neuman (22:00)
Yeah.

Anne Trager (22:12)
So to circle it back to our conversation and seriously though the balance of form and function is really important. what we have seen in this conversation is that visual design really does shape how we perceive things. When we initially see it, we see things first. There's that design aspect that is really important. And according to studies that have been done on this,

Shapes, when we see something that is sleekly designed, we perceive it as being more usable and more credible, like in the first tiny split seconds. So it's really important actually that that Liquid Glass that looks cool, that really serves a point. It serves a purpose. I've just answered my previous question. What purpose does it serve? know, here we go. we judge attractive products.

Fabrice Neuman (22:58)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Anne Trager (23:02)
as being easier to use. So isn't that interesting? However, we form judgments, stable judgments about the product's appeal, ⁓ like really quickly. Okay. And that happens upon that, you know, visual thing is incredible and all of that. Okay. ⁓ Trustworthiness in the process, in the product, however, comes a little bit later and it's comes from function.

If I simplify things, Functional usability determines how well it performs and long-term satisfaction. So we ultimately trust in a tool when we can use it and over it being And then the other thing that is interesting, and I actually looked this up before the podcast today, is this thing about feature fatigue.

Because like I said, I use about three features on my phone instead of the hundred and some that are available. I admit I'm an old fart. OK However, feature fatigue is a thing. OK And consumers, again, at the beginning will prefer to have more features at purchase. It's like, ⁓ this is, must be better. Right. However, in real world use, it lowers satisfaction because it becomes more complex. You have to spend time learning how to use them and

Fabrice Neuman (24:12)
Absolutely.

Anne Trager (24:23)
and it can make things less usable. I mean, literally, where is it? Like the question is, you have to go into the settings, but where in the settings? Because you have like 17,000 places to look.

Fabrice Neuman (24:35)
So one thing positive about, not specifically Liquid Glass, but at least iOS 26 is that, like for example, the search function in the Settings is now always available at the bottom of the screen before it was hidden ⁓ at the top and you needed to know it was there because you needed to ⁓ draw the list a little down to make it appear. So okay, one positive thing about the new. ⁓

Anne Trager (24:48)
Yay.

⁓ There must

be more, there must be more.

Fabrice Neuman (25:05)
There are

lot more new features and stuff like that, but then new features that you need to learn. it goes back to what you were saying, which is, well, so I guess our main message after this conversation could be this, beware of your first impression when you see, touch or use a new device, right? You give it some time before forming a judgment. And I guess it applies.

Anne Trager (25:24)
You

Fabrice Neuman (25:29)
more than devices, if I may say so. And also when you read or watch a tech review, maybe you want to give more credit to long-term ones from reviewers who actually use the device for more than a few hours.

Anne Trager (25:31)
Maybe.

Well, thank you, Fabrice, for this conversation and thank you, listeners. That's it for episode 23. Thank you for joining us. Please visit HumanPulsePodcast.com for links and past episodes.

Fabrice Neuman (25:57)
And thank you for subscribing and reviewing wherever you listen to your podcast. It helps other people find us. You can also share it with one person around you.

Anne Trager (26:06)
See you in a couple of weeks.

Fabrice Neuman (26:08)
Bye everyone.