Interface Geography
I enjoyed the question Christopher Butler opens up for consideration in this post. Is it time to remap the territory of interface design? He begins with a description of software design I'm very familiar with.
We can count on the elasticity of the brain. The perceived topography of digital spaces -- how users actually navigate them -- often bears little resemblance to their intended architecture. Users create their own mental maps based on use patterns, memory, and intuition. A button might be "up there" in a user's mind, even though the interface is a flat plane. A frequently used feature might feel "close," regardless of how many clicks away it actually is.
I disagree with his suggestion, though, for how we could move best practices forward.
But perhaps it's time to move beyond physical metaphors entirely. Game designers have long created navigable digital spaces that don't correspond to physical reality, yet feel perfectly natural to traverse. What if productivity software took cues from game design? What if we stopped pretending our interfaces resembled physical spaces and instead embraced their unique properties? We need a new pattern language for digital space.
It's a fun thought experiment. But it makes a big, common mistake. Or a pair of them. It centers the entire premise on one kind of person, a young video game player. You could probably guess other narrower characteristics. If your user base is only that one kind of person, and your business model does not rely on growing beyond that person, then go for it. That's not true of many applications, and fewer which intend to one day grow. The reason we design our software according to familiar, real world mental models is because we are human beings who live in the real world and this is the existence we know. The reason we prioritize accessibility according to A11y best practices is because software which works for everyone works for anyone.
The challenge isn't how we might teach human beings to reorient themselves according to new geometry. The challenge is in solving interface design problems which people can navigate without learning much new.
In my opinion, software works best when the borders between it and the real world are as dissolved as possible. Familiar patterns work because they work. The most durable patterns are those which we've been using for centuries. Or, better yet, thousands of years.
No harm in taking the moment to reconsider, though, as Butler does. At any given time, the paradigm may change. We should be ready for it. An actual paradigm change is actually on the way with hands-free, AI voice interfaces. That's new, as far as computers go. But it's also not a new mental model. It's an even older one! Maybe the oldest. The spoken word.
Anyway. I appreciated thinking about this. At the end Butler says, "The enduring importance of place in human experience suggests that spatial thinking will always be part of how we understand and interact with information." So he hasn't fully convinced himself of his own argument. He has shown me how much its worth keeping the question alive.
