We've been put in the vibe space
Jakob’s Law of UX goes something like this. I, as a user online, spend my time on many sites. As such, when I come to your site, I am already used to the way the other sites work, and I don’t want to learn new paradigms. Some also call these preconceived notions user mental models or affordances.
For years, we have been conditioned to navigate sites along several axes as content consumers: along search and recommendations, and along ecommerce and social.
On ecommerce search, we are conditioned to enter keywords stripped of context like monosyllabic cavepeople until we get what we want: “adidas sneakers white size 6 small.” Here, we are squarely in the goal space, and we are conducting mostly keyword search.
When we go to Twitter/Bluesky/Instagram/Discord/OpenTwang and we are served channel or post or image recommendations, we recognize that we are in the vibe space and can only influence these through our explicit and implicit behavior on a given site, which goes to some great matrix factorization in the sky and pulls out recommended items into a stream, or a timeline, or a carousel. We do this all publicly with the expectation that all our data is harvested and reintegrated into The Algorithm.
On social-type searches like Google, results are mixed because we perform hybrid search, a combination of keyword and semantic search that moves us closer to the vibe space: sometimes we want to search for “what minivan to buy”, sometimes “restaurants with mexican food and good music near me”, sometimes “tell me more about transformer models.”
