Tag Archives: meaning

How People Defeated the Open Web

The Internet began, first and foremost, as a collaboration tool. ARPAnet was designed for scientists to be able to connect with each other via asynchronous text message (aka e-mail) and change the world with discoveries.

Then, as networks of networks began cropping up and coming together, the promise got even broader. By the 1980s and early 1990s, you could e-mail someone (or many someones) all over the world even if you weren’t a scientist — even if you were a home hobbyist with a slow modem dialing up into the night.

The promise was great — the Internet was a communication tool that could Democratize, that could bring populations and communities together. When the web came along, it wasn’t very long until the technology was adapted for bulletin boards (web-based BBSes, essentially) and threaded discussion systems.

It seemed as though the promise was becoming real — anybody with a computer could participate in open discussions about a variety of topics, learning and sharing knowledge along the way.

Today, though, where are we? There are some pockets of such discussion around. But the far more common trend is the other direction. As an example, yesterday, Popular Science announced they were shutting off comments altogether on their site.

Their logic? Comments were bad for science. Why? Because anybody with a computer could participate in open discussions about a variety of topics, not learning but sharing opinion along the way.

Almost the same as the promise, but not exactly. And herein lies the conundrum: Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and in our country at least, they’re entitled to speak it. But there is no entitlement to a forum, and no entitlement to having other people listen. When we are increasingly self-selecting our information sources to conform to our own worldview, we have less and less patience for viewpoints diametrically opposed to our own.

So what does this have to do with technology? Part of it is unintended consequences — building a system that allows for basically unfettered communication in order to break down barriers for learning also breaks down barriers for opinion.

But another part is a reminder about technology’s limits. Few would argue (certainly not me) that the fault here is the technology, or that widespread networked computing is a bad thing. Rather, there’s something more societal that gives us values that permit (if not encourage) anonymous sniping and/or closed-minded trolling.

And there’s not much that technology can do about that.

Fighting Friedman

Many years ago, Thomas Friedman wrote a book with the (paraphrased) title, “The World Is Flat.” He has since written other books with similar themes (and titles), each generally well-received.

It seems that in some corners, designers have jumped on the bandwagon as well, embracing flat design for everything from web pages to apps to print pieces. Perhaps it’s a pendulum shift from the previous tendency toward skeumorphism, but whatever the cause, it’s everywhere. Even Apple is doing it for the newest version of iOS!

Now I’m no design Luddite, and I’m all for the evolution of design paradigms. But as with most pendulum swings, I think when we get too far to one side or the other, we lose something. In the case of flat design, I think it’s intuitive affordances.

Although the concept of affordances predates his work by over a decade, I can’t help but associate the idea with Don Norman. His book, “The Design of Everyday Things,” was (and remains) a seminal work on how to design for the benefit of the user and not the designer’s ego. The notion of affordances is that you should be able to intuit, by looking (or touching, in the case of tangibles), how and where to use an object.

In the case of an app, for instance, you should be able to tell what’s a button and what’s not; what’s being updated and what’s not; what’s editable and what’s not. But with flat design, you often lose the intuitive features that tell you where to tap and what is happening. You can be thrown back into the old trope of having to put “Tap to start” on the page or some other such instruction.

You shouldn’t NEED that kind of instruction. It should be obvious. But by flattening everything, a key method of providing that data is gone. As an alternative, perhaps a more hybrid approach makes sense, adding some hints here and there or some visual cues that bring just a modicum of depth back to the interface.

Because even though the world may be flat (according to Friedman), that doesn’t mean the world’s interfaces need to be.

From Metrics to Meaning

OK, I’ll admit it. I may be carrying around a little more weight than I should. The idea of an elegant dinner out sounds far better than a sweaty afternoon at the gym. But I’m not worried–technology is coming to my rescue!

After all, there are fitness bands that relay all my activity to an intelligent program. There are apps that will track my intake and exercise and help me monitor those metrics. But there’s a key element missing: the meaning.

We’ve all become fond of metrics, perhaps instigated by the lore of W. Edward Deming, who was thought to have said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” (Except he didn’t, actually, say that. In fact, his philosophy was quite inclusive, allowing (and even encouraging) people to make decisions that they knew to be right, even if they were unmeasurable.)

But anyway, back to the fitness path. So I get a band, or a device, or an app. Suddenly, I’m getting all of these metrics. I know how much I’m ingesting and how much I’m walking. Why isn’t my behavior changing?

Some might say willpower, some might say that last order of gyoza. But I suspect a leading contributor is the gap between metrics and meaning. There’s a step missing: okay, I know these are my stats, and something’s not working. But how do I get from point A to point B? What do the data mean?

This is not only a health issue, but a larger design one. Every time we show information to a user–every time–we should ask: what’s the context? What does the user need to make meaning of this data bit?

Think about breadcrumbs, as another example. Knowing what page you’re on in a complex website is useful. Knowing where that page fits into the site and your path within it is orientational. It changes one’s experience of navigation.

This is true on the analytics side, too — measuring clicks or session time is a good start. But what is the story that data is telling? Where do you go from here?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of the amount of data available. We can measure more than ever before. But it’s not going to really transform us in the most profound way until we get just as good at providing meaning as we are at providing metrics.

In the meantime, it’s almost lunch…