O’ Brave New World, That Has Such UI In’t!
“You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.”
- Mustafa Mond, Brave New World (A. Huxley)
For two decades, we’ve been mind-meltingly fortunate. A defense network designed to facilitate communication in the face of nuclear armageddon has, in time, blossomed into a gleaming instrument of freedom, liberty, and humanity. This tremendous equalizer is, of course, the Internet: that intertwined abode of humanity’s killer app, the World Wide Web.
This Web has provided a realm of information and human connection to billions of different people. Though at times ugly and “NSFL”, our World Wide Web has served as a bastion of freedom in an ocean of repression. We have enjoyed an unprecedented Era of Information. An era that is quickly ending.
Today’s Web is different. Information is no longer the Web’s first class citizen. Instead, we find a farce of design and flash, noise and indulgence. Less an “Information Superhighway”, the modern Web is a tepid well of consumerism and constant consumption: Media 2.0.
Certainly there are counter examples. Worlds don’t change by instances but by paradigms and to this end, a shift is undeniable: the modern Web is an instrument of consumption — a network of funnels and advertisements and distractions.
Old Media wasn’t destroyed by “New Media” — it has merely been upgraded to a smarter distribution network. One that we pay for. One that subverts privacy. One that is all-powerful. We’ve traded our computers for Nielson boxes with high gloss finish.
Turning to Orwell — and soon Huxley — it isn’t too difficult to glimpse shards of 1984 festering at the fringes of our Web. Countries like China and Australia restrict the flow of information and legislation in our own country seeks to further convolve the interests of large corporations with the interests of the people’s Internet.
Yet, as critical and essential as net neutrality is, I posit that the greatest risk to the free Internet — if not general computation as we know it — lies closest to Huxley’s famous dystopia.
Were you to ask a student to describe a valuable website or application in 1995, you’d likely encounter phrases like “detailed”, “carefully organized”, “functional”. Ask again today, and you’ll discover a different yarn.
This is where we meet a straw man: modern applications are designed to be “well organized” and “easy to use”. That technology has been made shinier and more accessible isn’t a flaw but a feature — and besides, this is what people want.
Consider, then, Steve Krug’s famous usability motto: “Don’t Make Me Think!”
My criticism lies not with Krug’s motto nor with the pursuit of simpler and more intuitive systems: instead, I take issue with the way we, as a culture, have been interpreting this directive.
Krug’s quote and the corresponding book is straightforward: user interface elements ought to be as simple and efficient as possible. No interface should cause the user to pause unnecessarily.
Notice the distinction: Krug is discussing the interface and not the problem domain. His charge is to design a calculator that doesn’t make you think about button location or output format, not a calculator that forgoes tricky calculation.
Neither does Krug suggest that command line interfaces are innately bad or that having a task bar and icons is akin to assaulting one’s users: his philosophy simply encourages one to value intuition over elegance so that the user can focus on what’s important.
Too often are our products — both devices and software — the progeny of a misinterpretation and misapplication of the “Don’t Make Me Think” philosophy. Developers forget that a great calculator can still solve great problems; designers forget that there is such a thing as over-simplification.
We, as builders, are imposing idiocracy on our users because we don’t want them to think, ever — but we’re not solely to blame.
The bigger problem (and the second strawman we’ll meet) is that simple, dumb products are actually popular. The future is simplicity and varnish: widgets and apps and mobile devices and touch screens. Isn’t the customer always right?
Not this time. Increasingly, general purpose computers are being replaced with feature-limited, proprietary, and utterly closed off devices: take a gander at Windows 8, for instance.
- Simple at the expense of power.
Despite the fact that these products are good fun and do handle a limited set of tasks exceedingly well, we mustn’t forget the impact that these walled gardens have on learning, creativity, and progress.
As a child of the era in which a computer’s inner workings would occasionally glow beyond the bevel and gradient of its windows, the loss of freedom is overwhelmingly clear. I, for one, would not be in this field were it not for the opportunities I had to explore a system instead of a toy.
- Simple yet powerful.
Our addiction to simplicity has created an implicit resurgence of anti-intellectualism. Fashion has taken priority over function. Now, we’re in danger of losing a resource that has defined two decades of intellectual, economic, and social bounty.
Our only hope is to remind ourselves of why the Internet is not just another clearing house for the mass media. We must challenge our tendency to forgo function over form just as fiercely as we challenge governments that would impinge upon the free flow of our datagrams.
This is our Internet to preserve and to protect.
Your startup sucks,
Brandon
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