My cat absolutely cares if something is shaped as a mouse, or a ball. He goes crazy for balls and mice. Throw a cube and he doesn’t give a shit

Babies do start to pick up on faces early on – we’ve got some hardwired stuff there – and on the mobiles there, the faces are away from the baby.

https://www.whattoexpect.com/toddler/self-recognition/

• At birth: Even though your baby doesn’t recognize you, she certainly likes the look of you. Studies have shown that even newborns, with their eyesight limited to about 12 inches, prefer to look at familiar faces — especially yours.

• Months 2 to 4: Your baby will start to recognize her primary caregivers’ faces, and by the 4-month mark, she’ll recognize familiar faces and objects from a distance.

Most of the complex details and shapes are facing away. Oddly, of the mobiles I see there, the few designs aimed at the baby are mostly black-and-white, not colorful, while I’d have also thought that color would be preferable.

Hey get in line buddy

Well, that’s the thing, it’s often the case that whilst the client is supposedly doing it for their users, in practice it’s not and is doing it for other reasons.

Mind you, I think that is more common when the software is being developed for a client which is basically a Manager in the same company as the users of the software (for example in In-house Development or Consultancy work developing a solution for a company) were in the absence of the very clear pressure vector which is the customers not buying the product (internal end-users are almost never given a choice to use or not that software, though they can at times informally boycot software they think hinders their work and get the project killed) things are often designed for the Manager rather than for the Users.

(Note that this is not necessarily done in a knowing purposeful way: it’s just that when it’s some external manager providing the requirements to the developers for the software being made for the area that managers overseens - though sometimes it’s even more indirect - things tend to be seen from the perspective of said manager not the end-users, hence designed to match how that manager sees things and thinks things work, which is often different from how the actual users see things. This cartoon perfectly illustrates that IMHO - it looks fine for the “manager” whilst looking quite different for the “end-user”).

Even is B2C you see that: notice the proliferation of things like Microtransactions in Games, which are hardly the kind of thing gamers - who are the end-users of games - wanted to have but which definitelly the management of the big Publishers wanted.

oh, I figured the users were the client’s employees.

It’s a reason why sometimes an open source project manages to be way better than a comparatively well resourced commercial offering. When the developers are the users, they will get the nuance of things.

Works well for a lot of “power user” software where the users are either developers, or at least similar mindset as a developer. Sometimes open source doesn’t deal too well with making things simple without power user features that casual users may find confusing or distracting.

I don’t know how that happened