Modern Romantics and the Social Graph

I’ve been letting the Facebook Timeline design settle in now for a while. Today a developer friend was showing me the new Open Graph API (described as Facebook’s core), and it reminded me of some thoughts that have been nagging me about the deeper implications of the Timeline user experience.

The Timeline is a wonderful narrative form through which to share your story. I have been a fan of the Feltron Annual Reports for some time. I admire the way that Nicholas visualizes the data from his life, bringing it to a level of art and storytelling that is really fun to look at and digest. But it is a difficult translation into the interaction design of a social network, and I think the timeline misses some of the key areas wherein social media has the most potential.

What makes up the timeline? Fragments of data – tweets, check-ins, snapshots, other people’s videos, and numbers. And these fragments come together to paint a picture of a user. Certainly, the way this data is collected and contextualized makes it interesting and rich from a storytelling standpoint. But it also turns “sharing” into a form of modern romanticism, so focused on the individual and turning the individual into the “core” of the platform. There is something sad about this – and something strange in the conflation of such romantic expression of one’s life with the promise and reach of social media. It feels like the social graph becomes millions of separate emotional projections competing for validation.

Social media at its best – in fact, the promise of the Internet itself – is not simply a canvas on which to publish our stories. Yes, it can do that. And yes, that is an important human function. But the transformational promise of this medium has always been one of interaction, not one of narrative. Interaction is light, not heavy. Interaction is fluid and dynamic – not linear. Interaction is unmanageable and prone to deviate from any course set for it. Interaction creates complex adaptive systems – not memorial walls.

This is why I have come to feel that platforms like Instagram and Twitter are more aligned with the positive potential of the Web. They encourage and empower the lightweight sharing of fragments – but stay focused on that. The content isn’t meant to be so precious – there is no bid for immortality. They remain focused on the stuff you share, without trying to immortalize the content as a grand gesture of its royal author. They simply provide a means to an end, not the end itself. That happens elsewhere. The form is more in tune with the function.

What do you think?

Views expressed here are my own, not my employer’s or anyone else’s for that matter. All rights reserved, (c) Jason Sack 2012. Reproduce freely with link and attribution.

Firefox 3: Microcosmic Innovation

I have recently upgraded to the new Firefox 3 browser, and it shows off some subtle but significant user-centered design innovation. One change in particular I noticed was the default address bar interface, that takes on the microcosmic engagement of the back/forward button. Who would ever question a convention that has become so standard and expected? The organic software creators on the Mozilla team did just that.

The change is based on simple visual hierarchy and task-based prioritization. Think about how often you use your own back button (come on now, you know what I mean) in relation to how often you use the forward button. The design reflects the use of the interaction, rather than vice versa.

Interestingly, a number of developers I’ve talked to about the new interface aren’t thrilled in general. And I am slightly bewildered by the proximity of the history interaction (it’s adjacent to the forward button rather than the back button). It turns out the reason they are turned off is because the display is different that what they are used to. As with any convention, adoption is a complex equation. Whether the button changes the way users feel about the interaction, or the way designers think about it is yet to be seen. But the fact that Firefox itself has built a nearly 20% share of the browser market by using an organic design platform shows that the masses are open to change. Let’s see how the 150 million Firefox users like the new back button.

Touchpoints of User Experience Design, pt. 3 of 4

Part 3 of 4 from the University of Minnesota MinneWebCon presentation, April 14 2008.

| View | Upload your own