a concept design move
A concept design move
Concepts can help you understand the structure of an app and diagnose design flaws, but what I find most exciting is when thinking in terms of concepts suggests a design move—a change to a design that improves it from a concept perspective.
Here's an example of one I've been pondering. Warning: like any design idea, this one is (currently) just an idea. That means I haven't actually implemented it. It also means someone else might have already had the same idea!
Concepts and a Dark Pattern in LinkedIn
The idea came up in a discussion with my students Geoffrey Litt and Josh Pollock, as part of a project we're doing applying concept design to dark patterns. In short, we think that using concepts we can explain why some designs are "dark" even though they don't rely on egregious user interface deceptions.
Here's an example. In LinkedIn, users can send direct messages to each other. But the company also sends advertisements (for its own services, and from third-party advertisers) as direct messages. This is especially annoying when you get an email notification telling you've received a message, but when you check you find it's just an ad.
What's wrong with this, we'd argue, is that users reasonably expect to receive direct messages only from users they've consented to. This expectation is from familiarity with the DirectMessage concept as it appears on many platforms. In Facebook, for example, messages from non-friends are quarantined as "message requests". So LinkedIn appears to violate the operational principle of this concept—namely that a message appears only when it was sent by a friend or connection. In fact, it's even worse than that, because, according to the concept, a direct message is from some user, but these advertisements are not from users at all (evidenced by the fact that the name in the from field is not a link as it would be in regular messages).
The Design Move
How could this flaw be remedied? Well suppose the fake LinkedIn user from whom the advertisement appears to come is actually a real LinkedIn account, and LinkedIn, by default, includes in your connections a set of accounts that correspond to the various kinds of information they would like to send you (whether advertisements for LinkedIn services, informational updates, etc). These connections can be thought of as having been established by the acceptance of connection requests that were performed autonomously on your behalf.
From a concept design perspective, this is better because the direct messaging behavior now conforms to the concept, without advertisements needing to be treated as a different kind of message. From the developer's point of view, this would eliminate a bunch of special casing in the code for handling the fact that some messages aren't from a user, eg.
From the user's perspective, conforming to the concept would make things easier to understand. Advertisements would no longer come from fake users, but from actual LinkedIn profiles (albeit ones that might not correspond to real people), so you could click on the name of the user the advertisement is from, and see a profile describing that message source (which might tell you more about who the advertiser is, for example, or who pays for the messages). You could choose to disconnect from that user or block them, so you would not receive messages from them again. LinkedIn could create a whole set of profiles representing the different categories of messages they send (advertisements, announcements, etc.) and users could disconnect from them in a granular way.
In concept design terms, this move introduces a synergy, because it uses the Friend or Connection concept to eliminate functionality that would otherwise be needed (namely the mechanism for letting users opt-out from receiving certain kinds of spam). This existing functionality is more familiar and easy to use than the specialized functionality for opting out of marketing messages: it took me seven clicks to get to the opt-out button from the message (starting with "Why am I seeing this ad?").
A Collection of Design Moves?
I'm hoping to build a collection of concept design moves, including not just new moves but also moves that can be inferred from existing designs. Hopefully some of you will have design moves to share—do send them to me, or post them on the forum.
Another example of a design move can be seen in static website builders such as Hugo, and I describe it in a recent forum post.
In other news...
My publisher has posted a Q&A in which I answer questions about Essence of Software.
As always, I'd love to hear your reactions and ideas!
—Daniel