I love the phrase “getting caught in the melancholy of the infinite scroll.” That’s just one gem from Alexis Madrigal’s The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook. He explores this strange dark side of “flow”, where we get stuck in an online activity and can’t stop doing it, even though there’s no tangible benefit:

What is the machine zone? It’s a rhythm. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop. It’s a powerful space-time distortion. You hit a button. Something happens. You hit it again. Something similar, but not exactly the same happens. Maybe you win, maybe you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop.

We certainly do seem to treat “pull to refresh” like a slot machine in a casino. And the chances of winning something valuable are about the same, too.

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Bundled Out is a great post by Charles Miller on how every problem Microsoft is experiencing today was written into its DNA in the 1980s. You really should read the whole post, so I’m just going to quote a short teaser:

Software isn’t an industry where the monster company selling the last generation’s product gets to stay being the monster for the next generation. It’s the industry where a thousand hungry small companies are waiting for a shift in the market that will allow them to slay the monster, carve them up and eat them for breakfast.

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Quentin Hardy has some interesting thoughts on what happens in a world of perfect recollection in his essay What’s Lost When Everything Is Recorded:

There is much to be gained from storage, of course. Who would not thrill to hear Lincoln at Gettysburg, or Shakespeare playing even a lesser role at the Globe? But Shakespeare’s plays were also reconstructions from the memories of diverse actors, some years after a performance. Our greatest literature was generated by an imperfect collective recollection, as much as it was written by one person.

I wrote about this issue before in The unnecessary fear of digital perfection.

Cliff Kuang discusses wearable tech and ubiquitous computing in Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner:

In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect—technology’s unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people’s day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying. That’s where the challenge comes in. The task of making this new world can’t be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who’ve always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It’s up to them to make this new world feel like something we’ve always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have.

I’m currently travelling in the U.S., which means I can finally drag some of my favorite apps from the graveyard screen on my iPhone to the home screen. I’m now happily exploring around in Yelp and Fandango, which I haven’t been able to do in a while. Even Foursquare — which I’m already a huge fan of — is suddenly on steroids.

At the same time, there’s one part of Don Norman’s The Paradox of Wearable Technologies that I keep coming back to:

I am fully dependent upon modern technologies because they make me more powerful, not less. By taking away the dreary, unessential parts of life, I can concentrate upon the important, human aspects.

I realize that when apps work well — really well — they do just that. It’s not that they get out of the way in an invisible UI sense. They are extremely visible, and they consume all your attention while you’re using them. But they take away the boring parts of life so you can focus on the exciting bits.

I apologize in advance to those of you who live in the U.S., but please allow me to gush a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Fandango

Buying movie tickets online is a mission in most cases. Even if you can figure out how to use the site, you’re not guaranteed that the payment gateway is going to work, and there’s often no way to save credit card details for future purchases. But before I came on this trip, I saved some movies I knew I wanted to see in the Fandango app. Once I got here, I just tapped on a movie, the app showed me nearby theatres and times, I bought a ticket using my PayPal account, and I showed my phone at the door to scan the ticket.

All the app does is take the mundane parts out of buying movie tickets — the search for a theatre, the payment, the ticketing process. It lets me focus on what I really want to be doing — watching a movie.

Foursquare

I expected Foursquare to be better in the U.S. than in South Africa, but I’m blown away by its usefulness. Here are some things that really helped along the way:

• Foursquare knows I live in Cape Town and that I check into a lot of coffee places. So when I arrived in San Diego the app told me welcome, and recommended some coffee houses nearby (a friend, who checks into a lot of Mexican restaurants, got that as her recommendations).
• After you check in somewhere, the app tells you where people are likely to go next.
• Because the data set is so huge, I find that the ratings and recommendations work much better across the board.
• For example, the time of day affects the recommendations — breakfast places in the morning, lunch places around noon, etc.

Again, this isn’t earth-shattering stuff. But it takes away just enough of the mundane parts of being in a new city to make your visit that much more enjoyable.

And that’s what good technology does. It’s not necessarily invisible, but it performs a disappearing act on the things you don’t want to do. There are certainly major, wicked problems to solve in the world. But there are also thousands of small, tedious tasks we deal with every day that we can solve with technology.

That’s what’s inspiring to me about these products, and why I’m going to pay much more attention to “small annoyances” as a way to get product ideas.

There’s so much good stuff in this responsive design interview with Brad Frost and others. I was especially interested in everyone’s thoughts on responsive frameworks. Here’s Aaron Gustafson’s answer:

I find Foundation, Bootstrap, and similar frameworks interesting from an educational standpoint, but I would never use one when building a production site. For prototyping a concept, sure, but to take one of these into production you need to be rigorous in your removal of unused CSS and JavaScript or you end up creating a heavy, slow experience for you users. I also think you need to work twice as hard to break out of the theme of the framework. There are a ton of Bootstrap sites out there that look like Bootstrap sites. Your design should be as unique as your product, not some off the shelf thing you just changed some colors on.

Agreed.

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