Corvus Consulting

For the past couple weeks I’ve been writing use cases for Ma.gnolia 2, and it’s been a rare chance to revisit old decisions about how the application works and to see what assumptions have held up over time.

In working through the bookmarking process, I came across the rule that new public bookmarks are not shown in a person’s collection or through any feeds until 15 minutes after they have been saved. This rule was put in place as a bit of forgiveness for scenarios where someone might save a link to something confidential or potentially embarrassing, or less seriously might want to make some metadata edits.

We have no way of measuring the success of this feature because it’s one that works by avoiding problems rather than highlighting and addressing them. In other words, it’s the kind of thing that works because it’s never noticed. And it works well enough that I feel comfortable asserting it as an interaction design guideline:

Where making new information appear as-soon-as-possible is not an explicit requirement, build in a delay of 15 minutes for adjustments to the new information to be made.

It’s a bit counter intuitive, so if you use that guideline in a team, take the time to explain that it’s not about delivering the machine’s maximal efficiency. Instead, it’s about adjusting the way the machine works to accommodate human realities, one being that we sometimes need to edit before publishing.