“A Study in Emerald” is a short story by Neil Gaiman—a dark, Lovecraft-influenced take on the original Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet.” It’s lovely, and he’s now made it available free from his site, complete with authentic alt-Victorian advertisements.
I can’t quite shake this concept of avoiding directness and simplicity in design to arrive at a better product—counterintuitive as that ought to be. Along comes Barry Schwartz (who I still regret never taking a class from) with another angle on the issue.
Schwartz talks about societal reliance on rules and incentives “to spare us from thinking.” Overreliance on rules and incentives prevents disaster—but they do so by ensuring mediocrity. Incentives shape the way we think about questions, and encourage us to think in particular ways—usually ways that are self-interested.
Using incentives to shape behavior is a key area of thought and research in politics and economics, and also in design. We’re instructed to make our interfaces as clear and obvious and navigable as possible, because that’s what the user wants—as Steve Krug puts it, the user is screaming It’s the title of Krug’s book. “Don’t make me think!”
That doesn’t seem right to me. Surely we do want our users to think. We don’t (usually) want them to think about the interface—rather, we want them to think about what we’re selling (or what we’re saying). Is the “don’t make me think” model of design promoting a culture of users that gloss websites rather than engage with them?
We already know that users See, e.g., “How Little Do Users Read?”skim rather than engage content on the web, they gloss text instead of reading it, they bounce off to other pages quickly, following hyperlinks, advertisements, and any of the other distractions our designs (not to mention the browsers they sit in) provide. I’ve always thought (and I think it’s a common perception) that the best way to combat the myriad distractions of the modern web is by keeping the design from getting in the way of the content.
Maybe, instead, we should be placing the design squarely in the way of the content. Rather than simplifying the experience, we should make it more involved, drawing the user in through more complex interfaces. Such an interface must work not by staying out of the user’s way, but by engaging the user in a way that delights and fascinates without annoying or frustrating.
Aarron Walter discusses one way of approaching this with his talks on Emotional Interface Design—going beyond mere usability to create interfaces that are playful and fun. It’s not the only way. It may be as simple as For example, Thinking For A Living. breaking the flow of the text, or it may require more complicated arrangements.
An interface that gets out of the way of its user is not a bad interface. But let’s agree on on this: a design that’s so usable that its users are free to ignore the content it’s presenting, though not a disaster, is still a failure of design. Let’s make our users think.
It was about a hundred years ago that Teddy Roosevelt took sides within his Republican Party over the central tension within it, between progressive reformers and corporate conservatives. He was categorical in his belief that it was government’s duty to act, on behalf of the people, to rein in the excesses of corporate America:
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
He goes on like that for pages—about conservation, about welfare, about labor laws, and especially about corporate power. The speech today reads like a liberal manifesto, though Roosevelt considered himself a conservative. After 1910, he broke with Taft’s corporatist Republicans and in 1912 he lead a strong third-party bid for the Presidency that relegated Taft to third place; the winner, Woodrow Wilson (also a progressive), adopted much of the “New Nationalism” that Roosevelt advocated.
Today, no liberal politician would be caught dead reading out a speech like this one—at least not where they might be heard by anyone. But it’s not just the content that’s radical, it’s the tone. He builds his case slowly, and works from fundamental principles. His argument is carefully balanced: while he is roundly critical of the corporatist systems he sees as a cancer upon the nation, he is respectful of the opposing view. Property is important and a positive good, he says, — but people are still more important. He accords opposing views respect, but without conceding their argument any ground.
But the biggest difference between Roosevelt’s tone and that of modern liberals is the way he appeals to patriotism.
Modern liberals often talk (with much consternation and hand-wringing) about how people on the right are “voting against their interests,” and in the way many liberals think about it, it’s true: Republicans generally support policies that don’t favor the poor or middle class that constitutes most of the party’s supporters. Paradoxically, liberals, whose policies are aimed at improving general standards of living at the expense of some individuals, do not seem to understand why people do vote with something other than pure economic self-interest at heart.
Roosevelt’s approach is much different. He speaks constantly of the “commonwealth” or the “public welfare,” of “national efficiency” and “common interest.” Above all, he says:
I do not ask for the over centralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism where we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike. The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the National Government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the National Government.
His ultimate appeal is to nationalism and to patriotism: if it is to mean anything to be an American, it must mean we have some fellow feeling, some concern for one another as people, and the government, as the province of the people, is the way to manifest it. And he’s clear, this will mean sacrifices, but those sacrifices are worth it, because without them, “we cannot go forward as a nation.” This is liberalism as a patriotic, moral imperative.
Changing the tone isn’t sufficient to win the debate today—the skepticism Roosevelt faced was that government was untested; today, it’s that government is incompetent—but it certainly could not hurt. Tired technocrats arguing about economic self-interest just makes our side sound like used car salesmen. We’re not. We’re trying to improve people’s lives. Let’s sound like it.
A lot of people showed up. No, I mean a lot. I have no idea how many, exactly, so I’m going to guess around 300,000. There were people in costumes, and quite a few silly signs.
So why’d we all go out there?
We spend a lot of time separating ourselves, instead of thinking of ourselves and one other as Americans first and partisans second. It’s easy to paint with a broad brush, and deride one another as Marxists or whatever.
My generation—and though it goes both ways, it’s especially those of us that count ourselves as liberals—spend a lot of time being told how we’re not American. This was our rejoinder.
I’ve been experimenting lately with HDR photography, where you combine several shots of the same subject to get a richer image.
Invariably in public spaces you get people walking through the shot, in different places from exposure to exposure, and your composite image renders them as ghosts, the faint outlines of people or birds or cars too ephemeral to be fully captured on film.
I like these ghosts. They remind me that the camera’s is an imperfect eye, capturing not even the fullness of a single moment in time. Like any recording, it is an interpretation of events.
Now we learn that poor font selection can improve reading comprehension. Comic Sans makes you understand things better. Heaven help us.
There’s an interesting idea at the center of this: that putting your reader to work increases their engagement with the text. It puts me in mind of Umberto Eco:
I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. … Therefore, those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Eco sees this as a means of selecting his readers—the ones who cannot be bothered to slog through the beginning section, he does not want—but I think there’s another way to understand it: by forcing the reader to work at the text, he must engage with it. The connection does not just select the reader, it reshapes him around the text.
Simplicity, legibility, and clarity are virtues, certainly—but they can also be obstacles. Complexity and obfuscation are not the enemy of communication.
Used to be, when I got coffee, I’d just go for whatever tasted good.
Now I have choices! I can get my coffee at Trader Joe’s, where it’s guaranteed fair-trade coffee. Good for farmers! Or, I can get coffee at my local grocery store, where it’s from a local roaster that uses only wind power. Good for the environment!
How did this get so complicated?
In which I take after Garrett Murray
A strange rule of the internet: No matter what you’re doing & how small it is, someone, somewhere, is, for their own inexplicable reasons, taking notice.
