Size of a Textbox
Content is Design
The devil is in the details: Details matter.
Everyone understands that. But how much do they matter? In the world before the Internet, details did not matter as much.
We had industrial designs beautifully designed down to the knobs, but the rest of the world simply used copycats where all the details were messed up.
We had architecture with the most intricate assembly of Corinthian marble columns, but it vanished in time when new building technologies come around.
We had urban plans with intimate concerns for its residents and neighborhoods, but their influences are only local and did not spread far.
Unlike a stereo, a building, a city, or any designs for that matter, users have far less choices when it comes to the Internet, say, for a functional web site: Google.
There is only one Google.
“Unlike a stereo, a building, a city, or any designs for that matter, users have far less choices when it comes to the Internet”
Yes, there are alternatives such as Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo or Ask search engines, but they all work slightly differently. A calculator in the shape of a rectangle and a calculator with a Hello Kitty sticker plastered all over will return the same results after pressing the same keys, but Google and Bing will yield different results for the same search term. Therefore, there is only one Google.
With only one Google, a billion people shares the exact same design of a search engine in their web browser. As a result, everyone is equal on the Internet. They can all pay the same price ($Free), enjoy the exact same design, and share the latest and greatest iterations of the design immediately.
On the other side of the Internet, there is Facebook. With only one Facebook, 300 million people will have to adapt to any changes Facebook make to their Facebook home page. But social networks like Facebook is different from other web tools like Google. Besides the ability to output results, Facebook allows users to input a lot of information. It is a web tool that goes both ways.
Traditional mediums, such as radio shows, can from top down. Everyone gets the same content regardless of the size and shape of the radio. The radio shows, the actual content, was what mattered most, and was independent of the design of the machines that played them. However, in the world of social networks, every user provide the content for other users, with special rules designed by Facebook to organize their input efficiently.
Even though Facebook on the web, iPhone or an Android phone comes with all sorts of layouts and behaviors, the content remains the core of the design of Facebook: there will be still a news feed, a photo gallery and a list of information about every Facebook user. There will be no content if Facebook did not design how the content is generated, and there will be no design if no users generate any contents. “There will be no content if Facebook did not design how the content is generated, and there will be no design if no users generate any contents”
For the first time in history, content is design and design is content: They depend on each other. In other words, to change the design of a web site is to change the content of it, vice versa.
Aesthetics as a Tool
The user interface design of a web page had never mattered as much. While it has yet to be as important as world news or politics, new designs for Google, Facebook or Twitter often send shockwaves across the news headlines in the tech industry, as it affects millions and millions of users that depend on them.
A small change in the design of a web product can change the lives of its users: A small change in Google can change how we organize and perceive information. A small change in Facebook may change how we socialize and relate to each other. A small change in Twitter may change what news topic we all focus on as a whole.
Such changes may as well have the power of a city ordinance, like how a change in parking rules on the street will change the street patterns city-wide, and even reduce road traffic in long run, but without the instantaneity of the Internet.
Design had never had such direct and immediate power before, and with great power comes great responsibility. As the design of a social network yields great social power, there is social responsibility in the design of it as well.
Take the size of a textbox as an example.
The size of a textbox determines how much people are willing to input. And by people, it may mean more than a hundred million users, as in social web sites such Facebook and Twitter. The amount of people willing to input depends on several factors: the perceived limit of words one can fit inside this box, the peer pressure of how much others had typed, the rewards gained and efforts required for such input, and how much one actually has to say.
Twitter:
Twitter is clever in the way it has low expectations in what one can input, thus its 140 character limit, which may amount to less than 20 words. Such limit, however, is not restrictive but liberating, because most users feel easy to fill up the whole textbox, with its large fonts. Long-winded users will compress their input so they can be digested easily by others. Its results are impressively efficient: Information can now be laid out in a flexible and modular manner, as they are all in a similar compact size, which is easy to digest. However, the results are also devoid of pictures and media, and edges on the danger of generalizing information due to its repetition, thus devolving humanity into a giant database.
MySpace:
Peer pressure has a long lasting effect on the input, most apparently on MySpace. Before the new MySpace profile layout came around (which a meager amount of users had transitioned to), the old Add Comments box in MySpace had space for 10 lines and font size so small it suggested users to type more than 150 words. Users, of course, refused to type this many words, as the rewards gained for such comments are low, since MySpace does not have a system to post comments on comments to trigger meaningful discussions. As a result, most users simply input the least they can do, or worse, post a giant picture to fill the box. Peer pressure turned into cultural habits in long run, and it will take the web page years to repair the damage of what was initially a poorly designed textbox.
Facebook:
Facebook, in comparison, has a more lenient approach. Initially shown as a one-line textbox that can fill only one sentence, it expands into two lines on users’ click, suggesting that it can be expanded to fill even more lines. The box begins to show fatigue after 5 lines of text, as the density of the text compared to the rest of the page together with peer pressure begins to suggest the user to type less. This natural approach to limiting text gives users a smoother experience than the hard limit imposed by Twitter. As a result, Facebook news feeds often have text of optimum lengths, neither too short or repetitive, nor too long or with pictures too distracting. However, balance had yet to be struck between the intimidating length of the page and the inclusive height of each feed item.
Scientific studies can further verify how closely related human behaviors and aesthetics theories are. For instance, heat maps were used to study how eye movements across a web page correspond to what the users click. Like how primates identify faces from top left to bottom right, we read web pages the same way. Elements such as boxes, divider lines, and spacing between elements clearly affect how one perceive a web page, thus one absorbs the information on it.
Qualities that are used to be left in the realms of aesthetics such as proportion, alignment, distribution and colors are now tools for organizing information and guiding users to make suggested choices.
To the Hive Mind
In the beginning of the computing age, software used to be molded after human experiences in reality. The design of a word processor would mimic how a typewriter works, while the design of music creation software would simulate a piano. As time goes by, we found new shortcuts and abstract ways to achieve the same results with higher efficiency and more creative output. Electronic forms and new means of communication such as email would eliminate the need for traditional word processing altogether, while music creation took on abstract concepts such as loop-based timeline and modular programming to allow new genres of music to be created.
“Instead of creating user interfaces mimicking human experiences, these new tools are the other way around”
Web 2.0, meanwhile, has been a paradigm shift. Instead of creating user interfaces mimicking human experiences, these new tools are the other way around: New types of societies and human experiences are formed after them. Internet forums, instant messaging and personal news feeds are modeled after nothing we had every done before, but users adopted these new ways of communication in doves. Instead of being able to communicate face-to-face, one-to-one, or all five senses at a time, we can now communicate one-to-many, many-to-one and each sense at any time, forming a Hive Mind of collective consciousness and shared knowledge.
However, a misstep in the design of a web tool used by many can sterilize humanity of emotion, while a small meaningful gesture can help us better relate to each other to form a better world. The designers of the Web are the designers of the society of the future, and we should use our power responsibly by taking the details of our designs more seriously.
As our tools become more and more embedded into us in an intimate and microscopic level, the design of their intricate details is magnified in their importance. In the brave new virtual world that we all helped created and designed by filling in our own knowledge and information, nothing is arbitrary anymore.
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