Messy Humans Don’t Evolve (as Quickly as Technology)
At Apple in the early ’90s, my UX team and I observed how people organize information. We were looking for fresh ideas and real issues we could address. Our key finding: loose organization schemes — that is, piles of stuff — are super useful. They allow us to keep current work ready at hand. We can avoid having to name and file things away. Piles are forgiving — they don’t need to be narrowly defined, their disheveled nature is part of their attraction.
Expanding the desktop to include Piles — in addition to folders — seemed like an interesting idea to pursue.
We suggested piles as a useful metaphor to our collaborators in the information retrieval group. Perhaps piles could appropriately represent clustering algorithm outcomes? They ran with it, and we proceeded to design, iterate and test piling user interfaces and interactions to add to the Apple Operating System.
We wrote papers. We were granted a patent. We assembled a compendium of design rationale supporting the work which I shopped all around Apple. I presented at the WWDC in 1992. We received a lot of attention and enthusiasm for the work. But…it didn’t ship. I left Apple at the end of 1993.
Flash forward to 2018. OS Mojave ships in September and includes a feature called Stacks. It’s clearly derivative of our work (although that’s not been officially verified). People who remember the early work say we were prescient, way ahead of our time. That’s flattering, but not completely true. It’s not that we came up with these designs out of thin air. Rather, we tapped into ideas with enduring appeal because we invested time in understanding people and their needs and designing for them.
The truth is, people don’t change much. Our research into how people organized things in the ‘90s is completely valid today. It was a pain to file things away then, it’s still a pain to put things away now. Computer desktops are just as ready for computer-assisted organization features as they were 30ish years ago.
Understanding your users and their motivations provides valuable insights. That understanding doesn’t go stale; the features and functions derived from it have longevity. Technology is moving much faster than human evolution (even if it sometimes seems most people have grown iPhone hand extensions). There are certainly as many humans with messy desktops today as there were in 1990.
However, there are myriad different decisions that go into launching a product feature. Just because it’s a good or useful doesn’t mean it is going to ship. Today, we talk a lot about MVPs and product roadmaps, aiming to balance competing priorities. Marketing, positioning, engineering, software development, and other concerns play a solid role in determining what deserves to ship at any given time.
Presumably, over the years, many other features were prioritized and productized instead of piles; tradeoffs were made. Even though other considerations led Apple to put off shipping Stacks until now, it’s always been right for humans.
