Tangibility in Web Design
With web interactions moving into more physical spaces like touch screens, its important to stop and reconsider what connects us with web content.
The internet has given so many benefits to the world of design and information architecture that sometimes we forget what we lost in the process - in exchange for an immediate, worldwide distribution of our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, a certain amount of craftsmanship was relinquished as we attempted to harness this new form of media. In the early days of online communication, the behind the scenes processes it took just to get a web page live were so intricate, that often most of the work went into simply getting your work to a viewable stage - even after the introduction of CSS and JavaScript, network speed greatly restricted detail and graphical panache. As David Sedaris points out in Me Talk Pretty One Day, “[Computers] made writing fun. They did not, however, make reading more fun.”
Though a confessed hater of computers, Sedaris has a point for all of us. In the frantic courses to bring every detail of our world to a globally visible level, we’ve momentarily lost touch with what connected us to information in the first place – tangibility.
The online format is, to degrees, becoming second nature to all of us. However, it still has little bearing on the things we interact with in our physical world. Standards in web design online work inside their own world, but that’s the problem - the internet has its own rules, its own conventions and norms that define an arbitrary set of human interaction that is completely new to us, and has to be learned. They come from two completely different schools of thought. This - not an assumed technological or age barrier - is why your grandmother calls you weekly to unload a series of computer questions that seem second nature to you. She’s grown up in a world of physical interactions hinged on observable physical laws. To her, the internet is a cryptic game of Simon Says.
Luckily, we are beginning to move out of this phase of online interaction. I'm not just talking about going nuts with textures and drop shadows to simulate something written on a real sheet of paper - I’m talking about logical interactions. As technology becomes more flexible, it can be bent to mirror our world, rather than a more advanced version of its own. Take, for instance, the iPad. The true innovation here isn’t multitasking or GPS or giant Angry Birds (though don’t get me wrong - that’s one of its best parts). It’s that the device can be handed to a four year old and piloted instinctively. This isn’t a case of smarter kids, its smarter design. It’s a matter of realizing that a certain set of standards are ending, and that a new one is beginning.
And guess what? You get to be a part of it. This is the most exciting part to me, personally. People can touch our websites. They can flip through them, shake them, turn them over in their hands. It’s the digital equivalent of discovering a new continent - it’s a fertile, uncharted territory that is ours to settle. It may be the first, primitive step in something much grander, but the tracks have to be laid here to reach wherever it's going. So don’t be afraid of dead ends - try different methods until your sites break out of their former casings and your users know - instinctively - how to interact with them. With more options than ever, you might inadvertently help develop the conventions that bring the web one step further, out of the ether, and into the world of tangibility.