I like nice…

I’ve never liked having to ’save’ documents on a computer – I think it’s bad design.

In the real world you write on a piece of paper; and then you have something tangible. To introduce the paradigm that you then have to save the work you’ve done was something introduced by computer systems, and has carried through since. A much better paradigm is to have everything you enter into a document for example, or everything you edit on a photo to be automatically saved. Of course saving a copy is fine as you can save a copy with new changes. The power of computers can be used to ‘turn back time’ to a previous version of an item, even before some destructive changes.

A few tools use this paradigm, such as Aperture or OneNote – just to pick two at random. Whatever you do to an image in Aperture is what happens to the image. You don’t have to edit, then save. Similarly, you can type something into OneNote, and close it immediately – what you’ve typed is automatically saved. Should you want to ’save’ a document, you should be able to ‘file’ it, which is the way I’d prefer to work.

To paraphrase a comment from my father when I suggested he tried using Linux instead of Windows on his next upgrade: “…but I like Windows – it’s taken me ages to learn”.

Bad design establishes new patterns of work, and human beings – being the adaptable creatures we are – learn to adapt and live with things. This isn’t to say that bad design is acceptable. After my dad started using Linux, he found it much more intuitive for him, and liked it. “Seems to be doing what I want” was his reply when I asked him. Of course the argument isn’t that Windows is bad and GNOME Desktop is good. Of course there are bad designs on many systems.

It’s important to challenge things, and ask *why* am I doing it this way. Is it because it’s the way it’s ‘always been done’, or can I do something different…

Last week I was at the Thinking Digital conference, and hear some stunningly inspiring talks by people such as Ray Kurzweil, Jonathan Harris, Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons (I’m ok to divulge that right?), Aubrey de Grey and Carl Honore, amongst others.

During the first workshop I attended; Entertainment meets the Geek presented by Eric Lindstrom & Steve Jelley, the speakers talked about how sites were positioned in ‘the market’. Now their perspective was from pretty much from the point of an economist, but they had a graphic showing how sites fitted into a matrix of entertainment, social networking etc. This matrix was a compass that showed the sites as they fit into various types of use and design. 

The important thing, I understood from the session, was to understand where you fit. It’s also important to understand that they were presenting the delivery of digital media through a hub site – which is positioned in a particular part of that compass; ‘entertainment and information’-related.

It all reminded me of something I overheard on the train a little while ago, and made me smile. There were two guys talking, and one of them asked: “Have you got a YouTube page?”. The other guy replied “No, but I’m going to get one…”. “You should..it’s loads better than MySpace” was his reply.

Now YouTube wasn’t positioned as a social networking site, although this guy clearly didn’t share that opinion. To him it was a place he hung out, entertained himself, probably argued with people and added his own content and opinions to the internet. We spend a lot of time designing a ‘tool’ for a particular task, and then realise it doesn’t really work in the way we intended, or that users don’t respond to it in the way we thought they would.

I had the chance to talk to the guys after the workshop and I related this story to them just as a humourous aside, but I realised then that we spend so much time postulating over ’social networking’ sites, ‘entertainment sites’ etc, that it’s easy to forget that they’re about people, and empowering them to experience the site and feel part of it. This is obvious in the threads of ‘video responses’ on YouTube, where – virally – people respond to a particular video with their own video, and so on…

An interesting point they made though was that more YouTube content is viewed off-site than on-site, yet YouTube still remains dominant. You don’t have to explicitly visit the site to view content, and can present YouTube content on your own site or page. The ability to ‘take a part of the site away’ and embed it in your site is particularly powerful, and one of the keys to success of YouTube (although lots of sites tried to do the YouTube thing, but at the wrong time: before broadband ubiquity).

It’s the lot of a person that works in the industry to think about these things, but we shouldn’t forget that only users know how they want to interact with a site. Users don’t consider YouTube to be too different from Facebook in that they can link up with friends, entertain themselves and have an effect on the site.

So is this about designing experiences rather than tools?

I work in the tech industry, but I’m also an artist and musician, so was inspired to start my millionth blog about ‘nice’, and how I like it. 

Most of my time is spent asking why something is aesthetically pleasing, or a great experience – so I thought I’d start this blog to ask exactly that.