I'm Todd Sieling, and I help design software experiences and strategies for the web. Here I write and can be contacted about creating humane, effective and memorable products for the connected world.
Learn about what I bring to making better softwareEvolution is a funny thing, and by funny I mean like religion: easily grasped in the way that suits the dispositions of the reader. We often think that evolution produces the optimal, even the perfect, but this is nowhere near the truth. Rather than travel in a straight and rational line, evolution pushes design iterations along winding roads that can double back on themselves as easily as they can curve and veer in new directions.
Managing traffic, the kind with cars and pedestrians instead of clicks, can surely be called one of the Big Problems for interaction design outside the realm of software. Two innovations for traffic that I recently came across stood out for their strong parallels with successful software interaction patterns.
Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, must be losing some sleep this week. Just six days ago he made in one of his posts a call for a ‘digital flash mob’. The goal: overload the AT&T 3G network in a protest response to the company’s grousing about Bandwidth Hogs. Now, the Bandwidth Hog is a mythological beast in the world of telecom and internet service providers. Spokespeople portray them with propagandistic rhetoric as an invisible enemy among us, greedily devouring fantastic amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of us fair-minded, simple folk. Invoking such a cheap device is condescending enough, but the real insult is that these companies consistently fail to produce evidence of actual bandwidth hogs.
But that doesn’t excuse Lyons from what he must be starting to see as a bad mistake. His Operation Chokehold has escaped the crystal prison of satire and threatens to run loose in our world. That’s right, Fake Steve found the silly old book of magic spells and thought it funny to read one calling forth the Bandwidth Hog from the demon dimensions. As if in a bad horror movie (or a great Buffy episode), the beast becomes real and is loosed upon the world.
In real terms, the stunt is little more than a crowdsourced denial of service attack, and the FCC has already commented to that effect. Moreover, one has to wonder how much damage this whole thing will do to the future of unlimited data plans; if Operation Chokehold demonstrates a risk exposure in unlimited plans, the telcos will have a great shield to hide behind as bandwidth caps and tiered access once again rule the day and destroy a huge user experience benefit that Real Steve Jobs brought in with the iPhone: that you don’t have to wonder about data limits when you use the device.
By invoking the ethos of the vandal with a ginned up crowd, Lyons went beyond satire, slapped on a pair of jean shorts and made the wonderful Fake Steve Jobs jump the shark.
What Dan could and should have done is tuned AT&T anger at the partner with the trump card: Apple. They’ve shown us that they can and will break carrier exclusivity by punishing Rogers/Fido here in the Canada just last month, so why not reach for the lever that seems to actually work to the customer’s benefit?
If Dan’s satirical voice does wane after this episode it’ll be a net loss, but like the Fonz nobody made him get on those waterskies.
The proverbial They are often heard to say that a hallmark of good design is that it’s obvious.
It’s hard to argue that understanding what something does should not be as immediate and easy as possible. There are exceptions, such as in games where exploration and challenge happen in part by decrypting the utility and purpose of the unfamiliar.
Embracing that maxim, however, can lead us to dismiss the reasoning behind a design choice when the need itself isn’t immediately obvious. I learned just that by taking a close look at the recent update to the Apple Remote and its puzzling addition of a Play/Pause button.
If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.
Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.
Activity streams are an engaging and rich design pattern that’s emerged and matured quickly in the past couple years. From NetFlix to Dropbox to Facebook, they speak to more than just the utility of personalized pages reporting the latest. They seem custom-built for web culture and echo our ability to hold a conversation in a noisy room, teasing coherence out of cacophony, almost without effort.
Activity streams as a design pattern emerged and matured very quickly, as if rushing to fill a vacuum of need created by systems that deliver not only lots of information to us, but relevant information.
For some background reading:
Despite their rapid maturation and popular acceptance, there’s an aspect to Activity Streams that has never sat right with me, and has finally coalesced into a proposition for a new design pattern.
A confluence of web memes a couple weeks back raised two discussions over lunch: what could possibly be the enduring appeal of Archie comics, and do browsers have personalities. That conversation lingered, mixing with the hazy memories of reading Archie comics during one confused pre-teen summer, and soon I started mapping browsers to Archie characters.
The ease with which those relationships happened felt like tapping into some archetypal truth, so I decided to take it further and present the results here, tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Flock: Jughead Jones
Likeable, unique and a ravenous ambition that’s never quite realized. That Flock hasn’t caught on is unfortunate, because it does pull together the social and media-rich web in clever if visually busy ways. Jughead and Flock deserve better, but they have the same problem: they’re overshadowed by bigger personalities.
