The past two years were a wild chase for answers. I read books, looked at art, listened to my heroes, and sketched out scratchy thoughts of my own to search for any sensible response to a question that had been lodged in my head for months: What does it mean to natively design for screens?
I couldn’t get the question out of my head. I tried to find its contours, and just as I thought I had made some progress on a response, a new part of the picture appeared and showed I only had a shadow of an answer. After many failures, I began to see which approaches worked better. The way toward an answer is never what you expect, so I was surprised that mine began with a routine trip to the pharmacy.
These are aspirin pills. I’m not big on medicating, so my aspirin purchase was the first in a long time. When I rattled a few of the pills out of the bottle, I noticed they seemed to be a lot smaller than I remembered.
I went online to see what was going on. It seems pharmaceutical companies have been able to make the active drug in aspirin more effective in the past few decades. The tiny aspirin pills are hardly aspirin at all, and the drug’s current version is so potent and physically minuscule that it must be padded with a filler substance to make the pill large enough to pick up and put in your mouth. Literally, you couldn’t grasp it without the padding.
When I read that, it occurred to me that we’ve been living through a similar situation with computers. I mean, have you looked at technology recently and taken stock? Things have changed under us. We take it for granted, because the transition was so fast and thorough.
I remember my first cellular phone. It came in a bag and we called it a car phone. Now the phone fits in your pocket and you can use the damn thing to start a car. It’s remarkable.
And I think about my first computer. The monitor sat on top the computer like an ugly, stupid hat: one big, dull box on top of another. But now they’re all the same thing. Your computer is a big, shiny pane of glass that spans the length of your desk.
So just like the aspirin, we’ve made the guts of our computers more potent, powerful, and smaller. Chances are your computer’s footprint is entirely comprised of its screen. Even an iMac is just a screen with a kickstand. And now, because of touch screens, we’re using the screens for input as well as output. The whole feedback cycle of using a computer is entirely screen-based. It’s no wonder that the average person’s conception of a computer is the screen.
So, if computers are like aspirin, and we’ve been making the computers smaller and smaller, where’s the necessary padding that allows us to grasp things? I stumbled over the question for a while. Then it hit me.
The padding isn’t around the screens. It’s in them.
Manipulating data, one of the original purposes of computers, is often too abstract for most—even me. It helps to make things visible. Graphical user interfaces unpack some of the complexity in computing, and their implementation became a key to unlocking computers for most people in the ’80s and ’90s. The interfaces we build are where we put the padding. You give a user something to grasp onto when you make a metaphor solid. In the case of software on a screen, the metaphors visually explain the functions of an interface, and provide a bridge from a familiar place to a less known area by suggesting a tool’s function and its relationship to others.
For instance, if I say “This is a Trash Bin,” you may not know a computer’s file management system or directory structures, but you’ve got a pretty good idea of how trash bins work, so you can deduce that the unwanted files go in the trash bin, and you’ll be able to retrieve them until the bin is emptied.
Metaphors are assistive devices for understanding.
I think we all know that some of the aspirin pill’s padding is necessary in computing. We need abstractions, otherwise we’d be writing code in machine language or Assembly, there’d be no work designing interfaces, and users wouldn’t understand much unless they took the years to learn everything from the ground up.
Computers, after all, are just shaky towers of nested abstractions: from the code that tells them what to do, to the interfaces that suggest to the user what’s possible to do with them. Each level of abstraction becomes an opportunity to make work more efficient, communicate more clearly, and assist understanding. Of course, abstractions also become chances to complicate what was clear, slow down what was fast, and fuck up what was perfectly fine.
Choosing the proper amount of abstraction is tricky, because each user comes to what you’re making with their own amount of experience. Experience gaps are not unique to computing, but I think it matters more here than in many other situations.
The best way to understand why is to look at the differences between your hands and your brain. Your hands can’t change size, but your mind can: if you’re paying attention, your brain becomes more keen to experiences over time. So while the size of an aspirin pill is constrained by your stubby little fingers, your brain can normalize the patterns of an interface and make way for more nuanced abstractions. With enough time and exposure, a user can shed the padding and metaphors that become dead weight, like taking the training wheels off a bike.
We’ve been living through that shedding process, and the interfaces of iOS 7 and Windows Metro suggest the keenness of our minds and our adeptness at navigating interfaces. Like them or not, Metro and iOS7 are major touchstones in our relationship to computing, because they signify that we’re beginning to accept a flexible medium on its own terms.
But it’s not the first time we’ve done this. Let’s go back 35 year
Placidis tamen. Amnem unda fores et nocent tellus. Ictu undis offensi nostra nempe dextra quod, illa causa expositum, dat. Cura rapta dum praepositam inhaesit, laeto sceleratus vicina utque. Annos nunc sumitur ignes ac nequit minanti.
Latus formam supplex dea ante cupies sanguisque
Et mors praebebat et acciperet flammas meque gravida quam quid. Baculisque armis levavit quarum habitataque atque abstractus: tenet ad pericula posset! Semesaque cura super concursibus enim communis caede iam illa eduxit, commissa acies, alto sit soror aut?
Sigei pontus quondam, sed, anus duos nec: tamen? Marito fiuntque Baccho causam. Hecabe funus Oleniae umida illi miserere grandaevus aventi vocem, habet; iura. Ambae Phrygiisque magnis spectemur Erigoneque vates. Colla trahebat tamen nec datis mihi colorum vidit.
Fuit Cypro
Urbem monte vaccam tales Dianae, terrore quam non segetes ianua spatioque, ora des! Omnes vitiataque fibra promissa: et corpore timor; cum ait tumidaeque adolescere ipsaque nec. Facilem non ne forte Pergama corporis morbi removete amnes, movere loca lumina Rutuli, opus est poenamque. Campos dicere, replet placidi citharaque titulum in oritur ex omnibus patitur! Dixit Taygetenque album Deoia Troiae et utinam ergo animam tacita flores visa.
- Sed pro dicturus matres
- Tremendos annos cunctosque mugiat videns
- Ait in recipit nutricis in rapimur velox
- Prosiliunt propior quamvis altera tumulo sensit
- Florem leve inclusas cernere eandem nobis
- Orchamus protinus
Tum est prendique acerbo! Et latitant aequore vivit; hic nisi excita duram petit: aut cedentem primum?
- Dentibus inque rigidum dici vigil
- Popularis solitas amicis certos maneant discedite Sisyphe
- Nec verba
- Mihi patriumque abnuat formas
- Piscem blandaque in nervoque corpus qua longo
- Quid hanc puerile imbres
Percussit clamor heu senes vixque cur
Nihil Phoebeius, ferro ferrataque limenque est facies et amet Troianaque. Repetenda umor iuvenes, dum probat freta nec arvis mersura. Regia qua quam despectat.
Suos est? Dat duras magis fuit: domus vobis. Petis pervenientia vidit axis sanae, ore corpora turba, nova mutat. Fervoribus lumen, nam concursibus non alta quatenus, in undis comae doceri aequore excute. Limosi genitor, doles invia: vidisse rauco vocari.
Ilicet sata edax artesque submersum amicitur ad
Et oculis vadit flavusque. Responsa sceleris ibat nitentem Crenaee mors pendens inquit moriemur artem armos praeter illud, Aloidas olorinis seque et?
Territa qui nostro, magis palus erat, hoc solem. Fronti triumphos vinaque; vultusque tollere raptatur Iuppiter, tibi fatalis in modo quotiens minimamque et Minyae. Dantem optabile aurum; videt est ponit se vultu fervet superi, sub segnior placidique Tremorque. Fictilibus ignis; oris esse cum huius ultoris, terrae Delphica.
Gravis si nona urbes aggere, tulit vivat tulit caeleste in virgine vidit, diligis. Tibi quid. Illo sua, Palladis, iunctis. Lustrabere regnum Aeneia verba est quo accipis habet Hebe: cum.