In a response to a series of posts on eBook pagination vs. scrolling (including mine), Dr. Drang presents the strongest argument against pagination that I’ve seen so far. From Scrolling or paging?:

Authors don’t write in pages, they write in sentences and paragraphs, neither of which are honored in a paged interface.

That’s a really good point. Pages artificially break up authors’ thoughts. Pagination is the hurdle-race to scrolling’s 400-meter dash. Everything is a trade-off though, so for the time being I will stubbornly stick to my preference for pagination, because as I said, I just find it easier to deal with.

I want to challenge Dr. Drang on one point, though. He says:

As for the sense of accomplishment, I am, if anything, even more dubious. Flipping a page, whether in a physical book or an ebook, has never charged me with a feeling of achievement. In fact, in paged ebooks I seldom have any sense of how far along I am—in physical books there is, at least, the thickness of what’s in your left hand compared to what’s in your right.

I don’t agree with that. Most eBook readers have sorted out the “sense of place” problem, and now provide both visual and text indicators to help you figure out how far along you are in the book you’re reading. Below are the interfaces for iBooks and Readmill:

Note the text-based information about the number of pages that have been read, and how many pages there are in total. The visual indicators, in turn, give you a sense of the “weight” of the number of pages you’ve already read — Readmill does a particularly good job of this. And iBooks even tells you how many pages you have left in any given chapter. Those indicators combined serve as a worthy replacement for “the thickness of what’s in your left hand compared to what’s in your right”.

Kontra wrote a great post on the real problems Apple needs to address in their software and operating systems. Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic starts with a statement everyone needs to take to heart:

The current meme of Ive coming on a white horse to rescue geeks in distress from Scott Forstallian skeuomorphism is wishfully hilarious.

Exactly. As Gruber pointed out:

The speculation regarding skeuomorphism as a factor in Forstall’s ouster has gotten out of hand. That’s not what this was about. This is about Forstall’s relationship with the other senior executives at the company. Personalities and politics, not rich Corinthian leather.

Anyway, moving on. Kontra goes on to list some of Apple’s current software issues, and concludes:

In the end, what’s wrong with iOS isn’t the dark linen behind the app icons at the bottom of the screen, but the fact that iOS ought to have much better inter-application management and navigation than users fiddling with tiny icons. I’m fairly sure most Apple users would gladly continue to use what are supposed to be skeuomorphically challenged Calendar or Notebook apps for another thousand years if Apple could only solve the far more vexing software problems of AppleID unification when using iTunes and App Store, or the performance and reliability of the same. And yet these are the twin sides of the same systems design problem: the display layer surfacing or hiding the power within or, increasingly, lack thereof.

Read Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic.

Spencer Beacock takes on those who criticize Instagram as “bad art” in Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing. He starts by redefining the purpose of the photo-sharing service:

Instagram is a tool and a model for easy, non-verbal sharing of experiential and emotional data. It is image-capturing for pseudo-ethnographic recording, rather than image-capturing for beauty or composition.

His take on the much-discussed filters is really interesting as well:

Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.

The filters are visual representations of all of the other sensory and emotional data that gets connected with the images in our minds.

Spencer gives some great examples of what he means by this, and then closes the piece with a discussion of Instagram’s role in identity creation.

Read Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing.

Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem:

The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.

Good taste is harder to learn, but it’s what prevents things like iCal from happening. iCal’s design isn’t awful because it’s skeuomorphic, it’s awful because it’s skeuomorphic in a tasteless way. A more subtle texture, a less harsh gradient, and more cues from other OSX apps could make iCal less of a laughingstock.

And while we’re at it, let’s also clear up what skeuomorphism is (and isn’t), courtesy of Sacha Greif.

Dmitri Fadeyev makes an argument in favor of continuous scrolling in eBooks (as opposed to traditional pagination) in The Return of the Scroll:

The scroll interface suits the variable nature of the digital content that it holds, but more so, it gives the user more fine-grained control over the reading experience. It feels more natural to scroll the page on a tablet because it creates the illusion of the physical medium, of a page sliding under your fingers. A scrolling interface also stops unwanted page turns if you happen to accidentally touch the screen. I’ve been trying out the new iBooks and while I think it’s too early to tell which mode is better, so far I really like it.

Even though his argument is solid, I still prefer the page metaphor when I’m reading an eBook, and I’m trying to figure out why. The closest I can get to a reason is the idea of “edges” that Craig Mod talks about in How magazines will be changed forever:

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing.

Scrolling is exhausting — it never ends. There is no sense of accomplishment. I once heard someone refer to infinite scrolling on websites as “a game you can never win.”

In contrast, pages allow us to hang on to some sense of beginning and end. They communicate a solid sense of progress. They serve as signposts to help us figure out where to stop reading until the next time. Where scrolling is an endless blob of text, pagination fits into the idea of memory chunking because it’s a more manageable unit to deal with cognitively.

In short, pagination lets you know that you’re getting somewhere, and not just running on a treadmill. Or maybe I’m just old and need to get with the times…

Update: @jbruwer pointed me to @simuari’s concept of flick scrolling as a possible solution. Video below, but also check out the post for more details.

Update 2: I wrote a quick follow-up to address some feedback on this post.

The Flat Design Era by Allan Grinshtein for the LayerVault Blog made the rounds a week or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s a really good discussion about what they call “honest design”:

Designing honestly means recognizing that things you can do with screens and input devices can’t be done with physical objects — more importantly that we shouldn’t try copying them. It takes too much for granted. Can you imagine your pristine iPhone built into the body of an antique telephone handset? Is that beautiful design? […]

It is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.

Craig Mod’s How magazines will be changed forever ties in really nicely with my previous post on embracing limitations in the digital world:

Like Newsweek, almost all magazines will eventually go purely electronic. […] Still, as I watch this shift, I can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. Not for the paper, but for the boundaries.

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing. […]

One of the qualities most natural to the user experience of print is the sense of potential completion, defined by the physical edges. It is a quality that is wholly unnatural to digital formats. The digital reading experience makes one want to connect and expand outward. Print calls for limit and containment.

(link via @RobertSBoone)

Nick Wingfield has a Windows 8 story in the New York times that provides a pretty good summary of everything we’ve heard on the tech blogs over the past few months. This passage from Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button? stood out for me:

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

If your software makes users feel stupid, you’re in big trouble. Quotes like Mr. McCarthy’s is a manifestation of the age-old legacy software dilemma that Microsoft faces with Windows: do you scrap the thing and start over, or evolve what’s already there? Microsoft chose to start over, and we’re about to see if the gamble is going to pay off for them.

My money is on the argument that Joel Spolsky made in April 2000 in Things You Should Never Do, Part I:

When you throw away code1 and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Or to bring it closer to design (and users) — as I argued in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience:

The main problem with big redesigns is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase from John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.

I think we’re going to see a lot of sinking in the coming weeks…

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1. I’m not implying that Microsoft is throwing out ALL THE CODE, but they are pretty adamant that this project is about “reimagining Windows from chips to experience”. ↩

Nishant Kothary wrote an excellent piece about the different types of signal on social media sites, and how some networks are designed to self-police dishonest signals to such an extent that it hurts the quality of the relationships. From Why Instagram Works:

Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you’ve created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means less, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, less meaningful engagement.

This ties in really well with that Google+ conversation I wrote about the other day, about how we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with hardship on social network sites.

(link via @ChrisFerdinandi)

Cliff Kuang wrote an interesting article about design at Airbnb called How Airbnb Evolved To Focus On Social Rather Than Searches:

For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational.

Cliff goes further to explain how Airbnb followed the data clues to understand exactly why the heart performed better, and then used those insights to make some very successful design changes. The data is there, we just have to measure, listen, and respond.

(link via @iamFinch)