It's all in the post title. And it felt like I didn't discover this on my own when I went to visited the product page of the dongle I bought in October 2020 (not an affiliate link BTW). When gathering links for this brief post I saw the product title now includes "Nintendo Switch"!

Did I not notice it before? Too focused on my plans for how I'll be using my first Android tablet in a decade? Maybe.

But then I searched my email and found a request for product reviews that had the old product title. Ah-ha, so it wasn't listed as a Switch peripheral back then or maybe it was truncated and consider how truncation works and that truncation is not a content strategy.

Why post about this?

Originally I wanted to share what felt like a lucky find.

Told this story on my experimental Twitch stream where I am streaming things like: reading my own blog posts and writing, drawing, playing games with a focus on the classic TurboGrafx-16 console, and incidental topics like discussing and looking at old video game instruction manuals.

I shared the story of how I was looking for a new Switch dock and it seems the old scares of third party docks causing problems is no longer a problem. Lots of new options and no big complaints that I found. In my searching I found a dongle that could power my Switch and send HDMI to a display. And it looked exactly like a dongle I already own. The one I mentioned earlier. I gave it a try and it worked great, even worked to connect to my streaming HDMI input.

Then I Noticed the Product Title Change

I've worked with and for the retail industry a bit in UX and one thing that's quite noticeable is the information architecture of searching and browsing has lots of tension. Tension between design constraints for humans and robots. Between usability and SEO. One way to look at that is asking if you as a designer are designing for robots which is search engines working on behalf of humans and mixed with the search engine's business model too. Or am I designing to work directly with the humans visiting the product page and their given needs constraints. Pragmatically I found it's both which is an interesting puzzle to navigate.

All this to say is why we find product pages with titles that are a huge unreadable paragraph of keywords about brand, product, features, alternatives, example uses all merged into one giant title.

Constraints and compromises. It's worth noting this if only to mention that as someone designing and building things you will encounter puzzles like this.

It's pragmatic for an individual designer to roll with this convention.

For all product designers everywhere who are working with product pages on commerce platforms to roll with ultra garbage kitchen sink filled titles is another matter. Amazon designers, you are skilled, you are powerful, believe this and help move this pattern to something better. More user considerate for who is visiting you and using their human brain to consider all that stuff crammed into the title. Other retailers: you too should consider this as you get to bravely make it better than Amazon. Help people and others will follow you.

So Wait, Does this Dongle Work for Android and Switch?

I've tested it and found it to work. When I did I felt kind of clever and it was a fun experiment because my dongle looked like a dongle I found in a search that said it works with Nintendo Switch.

Seems it was the very same dongle just with a new product title.