Oscillation is a natural part of every system, of course, but let’s look closer. Here’s the speed at which a pendulum travels, superimposed on its motion.

At the point of largest displacement – when you’re deepest in a particular phase – you’re actually at a standstill. Only when swinging from one phase to the other do you reach your top speed.

While other teenagers chased the opposite sex and drank their parents’ cider, I played chess. Bobby Fischer was my Holden Caulfield; a gifted but flawed antihero. At university, my chess career dropped off as I caught up on the excitement I’d missed, but the mark was made, and I still play from time to time. I’ve even played a few Grandmasters, with little success.

Most people think that Grandmasters are stronger players because they “see further ahead”. It’s true that they examine branches of play more deeply than the average player, but the difference is slight. A couple of moves perhaps, but not enough to explain the gulf in skill.

Instead, the main difference is that strong players instinctively select good moves to analyse in the first place. Somehow, masters screen out bad moves without the need for deep analysis. Ask these players to explain this process and they struggle – all they can say is that they intuitively knew certain moves were more promising than others. It’s as if skilled players have developed “taste” for chess moves.

Psychologist Adriaan de Groot’s studies show that the process of playing chess is more akin to the design process than to mathematical reasoning. Both chess and design revolve around visual memory and spatial reasoning. Both involve a phase of orientation, exploration, investigation and validation. And both have enormous branching factors. The permutations of design are limited only by constraints and imagination, while the number of chess games of just three moves each numbers over nine million. De Groot explains that the discernment showed by skilled players is closely related to pattern matching. Grandmasters are thought to have learned up to 100,000 chess patterns and moves, which helps them to develop a feel for the right move in the circumstances.

So what role does taste play in the design process? My theory is that, as in chess, “taste” is simply the ability to draw on patterns and experience to help us choose better candidates for analysis. As such, good taste improves efficiency. An experienced designer doesn’t waste time on clearly ineffective solutions: typographically poor designs, bad colour choice, or unusable interaction metaphors. It follows that taste is learned, not innate. Experience, exposure, and practice give us patterns that suggest which solutions might fit which problems.

There are, however, more cautionary interpretations. Some critics and philosophers contend that taste is merely an exercise in reinforcing social hierarchy: the upper class has taste, the middle class aspires to it, and the lower class lacks it. According to this theory, “taste” is a value judgment about what is beautiful, desirable and proper in the world.

This leads us to the troubling thought that perhaps professional designers perpetuate their existence by claiming that only they possess taste. To avoid this elitist trap, we must expose ourselves to variety in design. This means embracing the low brow with the aristocratic, the kitsch with the refined, the masculine and the feminine. We should let go of the notion that only a designer can produce a tasteful solution, and revel in the ingenuity of the hack and the quick fix.

Whatever the definition, taste alone isn’t sufficient for good design. Give a Grandmaster two hours to play a game and they’ll play substantially better than if you give them five minutes. Promising solutions must still be examined thoroughly. This analysis – visual prediction, updating our approaches as we find flaws or learn more about the features of the problem – is the heart of the design process. Anyone who claims that taste alone justifies their design is misguided if not arrogant.

Postscript

Several years after graduation, I grew nostalgic for the tick of the chess clock and joined a local league. A strange thing had happened. My grade, the quantification of chess skill, had leapt from a mediocre 79 to a respectable 125 (1700 USCF, for American readers). Yet I’d not practised, kept up to date with opening theory, or played more than a handful of one-sided casual games. How, in ten years of lapsed play, had I become a better chess player?

Now I know. I became a designer.

Further reading:

• The Challenge of Taste in Design
• Style in Interaction Design
• Class and Web Design
• Photo credit: All Glass Photo

In Part 1 we saw that the web presents an ideal vehicle for beauty, and in Part 2 I argued that beautiful design is reflective, exploring message and meaning. How can we use this knowledge to create beautiful websites?

Making the web beautiful

We are certainly making progress, and perhaps I’m being harsh on a field still in its infancy. The web is only 7,000 days old, after all. Technological improvements such as new authoring tools, better screen resolutions, more bandwidth and technical convergence will free us to experiment.

We’re already seeing fresh visceral approaches courtesy of developments such as CSS3, typographic tools like Typekit and Fontdeck, Canvas and SVG. Even the death of web-safe colours freed us to try new visceral design techniques. Better understanding of usability, better design patterns and better web education has also freed us to try new behavioural approaches, such as the horizontal, keyboard-driven navigation on Thinking For A Living. It’s too early to know whether these paradigms will stick, but it’s heartening to see previously locked-in approaches challenged.

However, the key to creating beautiful websites that our users actually love, rather than merely tolerate, is to think at the reflective level.

1. Get emotional

Appealing to emotion is an important way to create reflective design. It means we must understand people, not merely user tasks. What makes them tick? What would they never dream of asking for? How can we improve their life beyond this one visit? The focus is therefore on experience, not just usability. These days I see calling a website ‘easy to use’ as like praising a restaurant for serving edible food. It should be a given, not an exception.

One way to engender emotion is through stories – an area where what we patronisingly call ‘old media’ is streets ahead. Advertisers, writers and film makers have long known the power of narrative and created emotional content to reinforce their message. Content strategists in particular should therefore take centre stage in our quest for emotion, using not just text but other content types. Some of the most emotionally resonant content on the web today is photographic, such as Pictory or the Boston Globe Big Picture.

2. Think bigger

User and business form the classic duality of design. We’re well accustomed to solving for the needs of both, making compromises and tradeoffs where appropriate. I now believe this model overlooks a third piece of the puzzle: the ecosystem. We should design systems that are good for the surrounding web and for society.

Many experienced designers already consider this intuitively through their work, but there’s benefit in explicitly considering these issues in our design process. Are we trying to make a genuine difference, or just churning out more wireframes to keep the client happy?

3. Lead

When did you last see a statue of a committee? The classics of design have typically been created by one person with strong vision and the technical and political skills required to execute upon it. In film, this is known as the auteur theory: the director is regarded as the custodian of the creative vision and the final product is his or her realisation of it. At the least we need to appoint leaders who formulate and communicate a vision for the site.

Assuming leadership can be difficult in real business contexts and can foster problematic attitudes, but without strong leadership, clear vision and faithful execution, we have no hope of creating beauty.

4. Think long term

It’s relatively easy to make something viscerally attractive, but how can we maintain interest after the initial lust wears off? Just as in a romantic relationship, we should consider long-term seduction. The odd surprise can be rewarding, bringing joy in unexpected moments of the experience. By varying things we prevent over-familiarity and the contempt that this can breed.

Possible approaches include rewarding people who explore to deep areas of the system – a tactic frequently used by game designers – or something as simple as unannounced free shipping on your tenth order. Google’s holiday logos provide a real example of how the tiniest detail can keep users interested.

5. Notice everyday beauty

My mother, a retired teacher, told me recently of the ‘golden moment’ in education. It’s the point you always remember, when you discovered something and suddenly your worldview was shifted – that “one way valve to a new way of seeing” again. Educational theory suggests that to create golden moments, you must recognise them for yourself. So notice the world. Where’s the beauty around you?

As we previously discussed, there’s beauty all around us: art, writing, architecture, music, products, nature. We should breathe it in and learn from it. It may even be that inspiration lies close to home. Perhaps web standards specialists could take inspiration from developments in the Flash world, and vice versa. Maybe designers can be inspired by developers. We should be aware and scan the horizon to find our own golden moments.

6. Be brave

Finally, since reflective design is about meaning and message, we needn’t fear making statements. We should stand for something and convey ideals through our work: both ours and those of our clients. Surprisingly, the web design community seems reluctant to do this. At last year’s IA Summit, Jesse James Garrett asked why there are no schools of UX thought. Why indeed are there no major schools of web design thought? Our movements and sub-communities are, instead, almost entirely technique-driven. To me, it’s sad that we’re more interested in endlessly debating topics such as HTML5 v Flash, rather than exploring the important philosophical approaches that drive our work.

Caveats

There are of course some dangers to these approaches. The demands of client work mean we’d be unwise to blindly apply these rules, and there are some difficult questions left unanswered. The most important is whether beauty is always appropriate. I suspect not. When I’m filing a tax return, I don’t want the system to speak about who I am; I just want it to work. When getting the job done is more important than enjoying it, beauty is cruft. Better for designers to let the task and usability have priority.

Reflective design shouldn’t become dogma. Fortunately, when we take time to truly understand users and what they want, it soon becomes clear when it’s appropriate to strive for beauty in design.

Hero design

It would be easy to misinterpret our discussion of leadership and bravery and overestimate our authority. Designers aren’t heroes; instead we must serve our industry, our clients and our users faithfully, discarding ego. Too frequently, I see design that is more about impressing other designers than solving the problem and making the web better. There’s no beauty in hero design, only narcissism.

That said, I think web designers should appreciate that we can play an important role in society. We’re lucky enough to work on the coalface of the most exciting innovation of modern times. We’re on the brink of wonderful things. So yes, we’ve underachieved, but given the evolution of beauty and the tools now available to us, the web is an ideal vehicle for beautiful design. We’re the generation to turn that promise into action.

I hope in five years to look back on this essay and laugh. If we work hard, aim for reflective design, and believe in the power of the web, I’m convinced we can create our own beautiful design landmarks.

Three types of beauty

In Part 1 we saw that the web presents an ideal vehicle for beauty. But how will we know it when we see it? What is beauty anyway? I consider beauty to be presented in three main modes: universal, sociocultural and subjective.

Universal beauty

Universal beauty is based on timeless, globally accepted principles. It seems to hit at some innate response within us all, as demonstrated by the concept of human ‘averageness’. Here, we see a composite image of dozens of female faces created by Face Research. We might expect to see average attractiveness as a result, but this prototype is certainly more attractive than average. One theory is that prototypicality shows the mate has no defects and thus is likely to produce healthy offspring. Another theory claims that average faces are pleasing because the brain finds them easier to process. (Perhaps the average face is Plato’s ideal Form in the flesh).

Designing for universal beauty involves careful consideration of the fundamental aesthetic principles of design, such as symmetry, harmony, the rule of thirds and the golden ratio.

Sociocultural beauty

Sociocultural beauty is governed by the preferences of a particular time or place. This is most clearly seen in sexual attitudes.

Here we see Rubens’ Venus and a modern runway model: a clear depiction of changing sociocultural attitudes to beauty.

However, there are more subtle examples: fashion, music trends and even philosophical interpretations of the world all go in and out of style, regardless of their inherent universal beauty.

Subjective beauty

Subjective beauty is the wholly personal encapsulation of one’s likes and dislikes. If you like big butts and cannot lie, you’re merely exercising your right to a subjective opinion on beauty. While Rubens’ work is reflective of the Baroque era, it also reveals his subjective preference for larger models.

These three types of beauty are hierarchical. Subjective beauty can overrule sociocultural beauty: we can individually find beauty in things that society considers out of fashion. Sociocultural beauty can in turn overrule universal beauty: universally beautiful things may simply not be en vogue in a particular time or place.

Three modes of design

So how can we design for these types of beauty? Don Norman’s book Emotional Design gives a deep exploration of the role of emotion & beauty in design. Adapting an established model of cognitive processing, Norman claims design typically falls into one of three dominant modes.

Visceral design

Visceral design is aimed at our gut. We experience a visceral reaction when we bite into a sweet apple, see a stunning sunset or hear a harmonious chord – it’s entirely sensory, before the brain has a chance to shape the feeling. A positive visceral response is often called attraction – it’s what draws bees to flowers, or babies to a beautiful face.

To design for visceral response, we should concentrate on immediate properties of a system: shape, colour and form. These can make the instant impact required for a visceral reaction – we know, for instance, that visceral response to a website can occur in fractions of a second.

Visceral design was an early frontier of exploration for the web, once the technology was sufficiently mature. This early landrush of artistic, highly visual sites was helped by the advent of visually-oriented authoring tools such as Dreamweaver, which helped graphic specialists make the leap into the web arena with familiar UIs.

It is easy to belittle visceral design as ‘eye candy’, but without this immediate attraction, sites struggle to succeed in other modes of design. That said, visceral design’s clear failing is that it rewards attraction over usability and real beauty. Command-Shift-3, which describes itself as the HotOrNot of web design, has all the depth of a wet T-shirt contest. Since we can’t use the sites it features, we must judge solely on aesthetics. Visceral sites often win awards (since awards are rarely concerned with use) and appear in those ‘Top 20’ lists we all know and dread.

Behavioural design

Behavioural design is concerned with use. Does the system work? Is it easy to perform my tasks? Does it sustain flow, or make us suffer constant interruptions by not doing what we expect? To achieve successful behavioural design, we can call on our nearest ergonomist or usability specialist. She will ensure our design has appropriate dimensions, is well mapped to user mental models, is forgiving of improper use, sends clear messages about function, and so on.

No one can deny that the web usability movement has been successful. However, understanding the user’s tasks and crafting a site around them isn’t sufficient to bring us genuine beauty. The reason is that behavioural design doesn’t always trump visceral design. Social psychologists have found, for instance, that women prefer prototypically attractive men (square jaws, broad shoulders etc) for one-night stands and flings, but they choose more feminine, ‘nicer’ men for commitment: the so-called “cads and dads” theory. This pattern is particularly pronounced at certain points of the female ovulation cycle. In short, we don’t always plump for reliability; sometimes we need something more exciting.

Perhaps the usability movement has created too many dads, and too few cads. Critics often claim it has ‘made the web boring’ – and it’s true that, when misapplied, usability approaches can create very mediocre products. For a slightly daft example, look at the work of artists Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, who surveyed the musical preferences of the general public. They asked opinions on instrumentation, tempo, pitch, duration and lyrical subject and assembled these into two musical extremes: the Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song.

The Most Wanted Song features a soft rock / R&B sound, using well established instruments. To quote the artists, it creates “a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72% of listeners”. Unsurprisingly, this crowdsourced composition, designed for maximum ‘ease of listening’, is anything but beautiful.

Listening to The Most Wanted Song, we can almost understand why some people equate usability with tedium. While it can help our sites to become useful and profitable, it can’t make them beautiful. For that, we should aim at the third, most complex mode of design.

Reflective design

Reflective design reaches beyond visceral and behavioural design to look at message and meaning. It asks difficult questions. What does this system say about who I am? Does it improve my life? Am I glad I did it? These questions are subjective and complex, and our responses will vary with experience, personality, culture and even mood. But there are strong benefits to asking them. Successful reflective design makes us feel good: we show it off, tell others and repeat the experience. It can even change the way we think about things. In short, I believe that successful reflective design and beautiful design are one and the same.

Consider the Nextime Word Clock. It’s made from two cylinders that rotate so that the time can be read from the face: “Five minutes to ten” or “It’s about four”. It’s less accurate than a cheap digital watch and hence less usable – and, while it looks good, it’s not as elegant as an analogue clock. But, to me, this clock is an excellent example of reflective design. Its accuracy is appropriate for the living room (do you really need to know the difference between 2:57 and 2:58?) and its unconventional design is a conversation starter. I see beauty in the concept, and the product says something about me. It’s for these reasons, rather than usability or attraction, that I count this clock as one of my favourite possessions.

Where usability focuses on behavioural design, reflective design is more the domain of user experience. It involves truly understanding what makes people tick and what makes them excited. It involves creating something meaningful that changes perceptions. Reflective design is a relatively recent focus on the web, which is perhaps why we’ve not yet created beautiful websites. But with sufficient focus on experience, I believe we will.

Rate of change

These three modes of design – visceral, behavioural and reflective – move at different speeds, creating shearing layers (familiar from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn).

Visceral trends come and go in a matter of months. Top 20 trends are quickly dated, be they illustration, fat footers or any other pattern du jour. Behavioural innovation is slower. Interaction design patterns and de facto standards (search box in the top right, logo and link to homepage in top left) emerge over the course of years and require more traction and mass support to become established. Reflective design moves the slowest of all. This is best demonstrated by ‘movements’ that define how we interact with the web – social media, the realtime web and so on – which take many years to emerge and stabilise.

Concluded in Beauty in web design, part 3.

The underachieving web

I think we’re underachieving. And I’m not alone in that belief. Armin Vit’s Landmark websites, where art thou? contended that the web design field has created nothing to rival the greats from other design fields, giving the examples of the NYC subway map, the Se7en titles and Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Jonathan Harris of WeFeelFine fame infamously contended at Flash On The Beach that there have been no masterpieces.

These acts of criticism stung the community. “But the web has changed the world!” This protectionist instinct is understandable, but while the web has indeed shaped modern life, I agree with Vit and Harris. The web’s sum is substantially greater than its parts. No one site stands as a landmark of design. Looking at some likely candidates – Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook – we would all agree that they’ve changed how we interact with information, commerce and each other, but are they truly design classics or, instead, disruptive business models?

The web is full of cool, impressive and useful sites, but beauty is missing from modern web design. This is a surprise, given its prominence in other design fields.

Automotive design gives us beautiful cars that arouse passion and extraordinary desire. Product design also gives us 1954’s Fender Stratocaster, one of the most important cultural artifacts of the last century.

We see beauty in architecture, for example the Beijing National Stadium, which inspired a city, a country and a global watching public in a way no website has.

In visual fields, Harry Beck’s beautiful 1933 Tube map (which I’ll take over the NYC subway any day) clarified the complexity of the Underground through the metaphor of wiring. Not only is it a classic of wayfinding, but it has become part of the collective consciousness and emotional fabric of the city.

We also see a more chilling beauty in Charles Minard’s map of Napoleonic advance, made famous by Edward Tufte. The beige line represents the French army’s advance to Moscow; the black their ignominious retreat. The width of the line demonstrates the size of the army and hence the appalling human cost.

The point of beauty

But why focus on beauty? Why does it matter that other design fields lead the way? Because beauty affects us in profound ways, however we may try to resist.

Studies have shown, for instance, that attractive people are more likely to be acquitted by a jury. We transfer this lenience to content, as demonstrated in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates. The radio audience believed Nixon to have won the debate, while the TV audience felt the more attractive Kennedy had the upper hand. Surprisingly, this isn’t a learned bias; it seems to be hard-wired, even seen in infants.

Beauty also makes things easier to use. Our brains literally work in a different way, becoming more flexible when using a thing of beauty. This is the aesthetic-usability effect. Apple know the value of this effect more than most. The colour iMac heralded the first mainstream melding of beauty and hardware. When combined with the good user experience of the Mac OS, the iMac brought previously unengaged users to computing for the first time.

Beauty is also infectious. Because it makes us feel good, we naturally want to share it. Why do we put art on walls and take photos of sunsets? Because it allows us and others to relive the experience. This pattern of telling others about beautiful things is the cornerstone of loyalty and advocacy, powerful and much sought-after concepts.

But I believe the most powerful aspect of beauty is that it can change our perspective on the world. In the classic How Designers Think, architect and psychologist Bryan Lawson describes this as a “one way valve to a new way of seeing.” Not only could a beautiful web make our users happy, productive and loyal, but it could help to change the way the world thinks.

But can the web, an abstract, impermanent and functional medium, truly be beautiful? Let’s answer that by looking at a common vehicle for beauty: art.

The evolution of beauty

In Greek and Roman times, art (and the ideals of beauty it contained) was mimetic: that is, intended to mimic and replicate nature. This is consistent with the philosophy of the day. Plato’s Theory of Forms proposed that there exists one idealised, perfect instance of everything in the world – the perfect cow, the perfect grape – that exists on a plane that none can see. With beauty resident only in these ideal forms, art and sculpture were a means to study them. Every (literally) chiselled jaw is an exploration of the heavenly ideal. It’s from the Roman era that the word ‘art’ originates, tellingly coming from the Latin ars, meaning ‘skill’.

This style continued into Renaissance times; but while religious influence continued the thought that beauty exists in a heavenly plane, the Renaissance also introduced the earliest stirrings of humanism. From this point, beauty became apparent in things that mankind created.

As we advance into the Romantic era, art is no longer literal. Representation becomes central. Turner’s 1839 The Fighting Temeraire is beautiful but not accurate. Instead, the viewer finds joy in the colours and emotive qualities of both the scene and the meaning. This abandonment of the literal was catalysed by 19th century technology. The invention of the daguerrotype, the microphone, and the printing press some centuries previous, allowed reality to be easily replicated for the first time.

As we move into the modern era, art takes a jarring yet consistent turn. Duchamp’s concept of objets trouvés (such as Fountain) mean anything can have artistic meaning in the right context. Subjectivity dominates: it’s beautiful if you find it beautiful.

Contemporary conceptual art now sees execution as secondary. Beauty lies within the thought, while the artifact itself can be banal and everyday. Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 stitched the names of former lovers, friends and unborn children into the fabric of a cheap tent. Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull (For The Love Of God) was made by technicians and interns: Hirst himself was director and project manager only. Duchamp himself permitted several replicas of his work. The idea is all.

Finally, we can examine installation art, designed for a specific space and a specific duration. It is by its nature temporary, and often interactive. 2005 Turner Prize winner ShedBoatShed (Mobile Architecture No. 2) was disassembled and reconstructed as a boat and sailed down a river. Tate Modern’s helter skelter ‘Test Site’ created enormous school holiday queues. Is it art? You choose.

Classification aside, it’s certain that many people find this work powerful.

So our understanding of beauty has broadened and shifted. Beautiful things can be abstract, temporary, duplicate and interactive.

The web is all of these.

Continued in Beauty in web design, part 2.

My work is used by millions.

When the thought first struck the numbers were lower, but I was stunned. I quickly surmised the only way I could retain objectivity and impartiality was to bury this thought, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m hoping that I can now make sense of it by voicing it.

Of course the scale of the web excites me; I’m delighted and humbled that my work can communicate with so many people. Very few roles have such scale. Architecture, perhaps. Journalism. Politics too, although I’m hardly comfortable with that comparison.

While I admit that it’s something of an egocentric thrill, I’m no household name and nor do I wish to be. Web design is far less important than, say, teaching or healthcare. What matters more to me is that I do great work, and having a large canvas provides me with fascinating ways to achieve this.

However, while the web makes it easier for one person to reach millions, it doesn’t make the relationship easier to comprehend. My excitement is tempered by vertiginous apprehension. From these millions, there will be thousands who love my work. There will also be thousands who hate it: people who relied on the old site, who appreciated a section I removed, whose needs I’ve overlooked in the hurry to get the job done.

With such scale, these users are anonymous to me, just as I am to them. While I work hard to understand them and design to support their needs, there’s no way I can know I’ve improved things for an individual user. I hope I’ve done right by them.

The angst of the user experience designer.

A blank wall is an invitation to a designer. As soon as the paint dries, I’m sure we’ll drown in post it notes and poorly-taped flipchart sheets. Heated debates will be held at the sharp end of a marker pen. The war room of my most recent project featured 20′ of whiteboard, which became a great way to sketch and walk through design concepts before stepping into prototyping. Drawing on the walls has thus become a minor fetish. It’s highly visible, and thus brilliantly suited to critique. It keeps you moving and alert, rather than immobile in your chair. And it also has the marvellous appeal of finally being able to do something you never could as a kid.

I hope to to share some of our scribblings in due course.

Firstly, there’s the pure language involved. “Best” implies something that cannot be improved upon. A world of best practice gives us creationism, chariots, and gramophones. It negates progress.

There’s also a more sinister side, which is when it’s wheeled out as an argument in design projects that are heading off the rails:

“Ah, but that’s not how eBay do it”.

The unspoken implication is that eBay know better than I, and therefore I should defer to their wisdom. It’s an argument that I find misguided more than insulting. The web runs on the basis of meritocracy in a way that many other industries cannot. “That’s not how eBay do it” is industrial, corporate thinking, entirely irrelevant to the 21st century. For the truth is that large companies often don’t have a clue about design. One’s skill and knowledge are entirely independent of the size of your employer: I’m confident I know as much about my profession as the employees at any large company.

The best practice trump card also fails because it doesn’t understand the nature of practical design. It’s not a transferable commodity: you can’t just screw a design solution into place. Good design must be appropriate and relevant to the particular problem. The factors involved—technological, strategic, sociological—are far too complex and variable for a plug and play approach. To say “Well, a dropdown worked here…” is to ignore factors that can actually work in your favour. A company that rejects the easy route and takes the time to understand technology, strategy and users can offer designs that makes it stand out from the rest.

I’m not advocating isolating oneself from the surrounding environment. For instance, at Clearleft, we regularly perform competitor analysis at the start of a project. It’s useful to see where others’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and helps us understand the landscape. However, not once has it given me the answer to a design problem. That always comes later, with thought, with detail, and after many failed attempts.

So let’s not allow the enforced limitation and unvoiced threats of “best practice” to pollute our thinking. It’s harder work, sure, but standing out and being better always is.

However, we’re also a little infatuated with personality, and often assume that someone’s actions are caused by the ‘type’ of person they are, while ignoring the social and environmental forces that influence them (the fundamental attribution error). In reality, personality is always framed and affected by the world around us, meaning behaviour can be quite variable. Just because someone’s angry once, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re an angry person. We have to work backwards, interpolating someone’s underlying personality from several observations of their behaviour. You can’t really get to know someone from a minute in their company.

For instance, at a football match, I drink, swear, and slip into a latent Welsh accent. This is no surprise—my environment almost demands it of me, since I’m surrounded by drunken, sweary Welshmen. But you’ll find me behave very differently in bed with a girl, going through airport security, or talking to my Nan. This behavioural variance is part of being human and people who lack it are deemed to be boring. If you behave the same in a nightclub as in a library, you won’t be invited out again.

Constrast this with technology, which behaves in a very rigid manner—the same in all environments. I think it’s time to make technology more interesting by introducing some mild behavioural variance. Sampled over a few readings, we can then start to form an opinion about the underlying personality, which is where we make those emotional connections.

Clearly we can’t go too far. Some behavioural consistency is essential for usability, and some devices are better suited to quirkiness than others. However, the dead zero we’re at now is clinical and drab.

Fortunately, we have the jigsaw pieces we need to imbue technology with personality. We just need to put them together. As mentioned above, behavioural variance generally comes from environmental influence. This meshes nicely with technology’s increasing context-awareness. Bluetooth, RFID, APIs, accelerometers, spimes etc, common geek parlance, all refer to ways technology is becoming more aware of itself, other technologies and us. But it doesn’t need to be this esoteric. Glade recently released a quite silly air freshener that only activates in the presence of a human.

The concept of an emotional response to technology isn’t new, by any means. For example, the uncanny valley:

I happen to think the uncanny valley is bullshit, but I challenge anyone to watch the following and not be slightly saddened:

So let’s imagine an operating system that sees you’ve split up with your girlfriend and says sorry. A program that knows you were out drinking last night and therefore uses muted colours and suggests you take frequent breaks. A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters.

This could be so much more fun. And the exciting part is I don’t think it’s too far out of our reach—for starters, we already give out plenty of these informational cues (knowingly or not):

Ultimately what we’re aiming for is intelligence (or at least pretence thereof) in technology. In the words of Piaget, “intelligence is the ability of an organism to adapt to a change”. I think behavioural variance is a perfect example of this adaptation, and for that reason I think we shouldn’t be scared of giving our future technology a personality of its own.

Based on my lightning talk “A rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights” given at Skillswap On Speed, 29 Oct.

Slides themselves are on Slideshare, albeit with some minor font inconsistencies. It’s also worth checking out Andy’s session on the user experience curve, and I particularly enjoyed Eric Reiss talking about e-service. Be great to hear any comments.

Edit: I’ve now updated this presentation for SXSW 2010 and written it up into three detailed articles. See Beauty in web design, part 1.