We live in a world where (most of the times) we feel free, even in our own cage. We are able to feel physically free inside our kitchen, room or any space that is physically limited. Those square meters provide a space for us to make "small" actions: to walk, to rearrange the books on the shelf, to move your workplace, to jump, to stretch... We can do almost anything regard to small movements in the axis X, Y and Z, and this is the reason why we have this notion of a 3D world: because we do live in one, in fact a really big one.

Those lately days of our planet, we human, decided to design other kinds of places to live in: there are a plenty of them, most digitally. And why? Because we are kind of sick of this one, maybe; or we just want more. You know when you have that urge to move your bed around your room to find a new place for it, in order to have a "new environment"?

One interesting detail about these worlds that we design is that almost everything that the human builds with the purpose to scape the reality is a square-rectangle. Is it a metaphor for a window, to "look outside" our world? Is that a way to dive into another place, but still having an outer edge to hold whenever needed? Maybe. I bet someone already said it in some journal article.

Lev Manovich says, in the book The Language of New Media ("The Interface" chapter), that when you crop a "reality" with a rectangle, you value what is inside its space…

… and devalue what is outside.

Despite of this disfavour of the limited rectangle, we, humans, are able to imagine what is outside the lines, this is, to see through the frames and imagine what could compose the rest of the "painting". When we create this continuation to the picture, we are creating a virtual reality, according to Manovich.

We carry frames inside our pockets

I told you this story about the frames because I wanted to talk about a really small, but yet powerful, detail that designers need to remember.

Well, within all the places we created to live inside, we created a really small one, but powerful. Who here has a phone, specially a smartphone, that keeps you off, at least for some minutes, from our real reality (aka real life, life whatever you prefer to call it)?

Yes, we really frame our digital reality by using a screen in our smartphone. But are we really able to imagine what is outside our screen?

Well, when you are talking about pictures is easier. When you see a picture with half of a cover of a book you can easily imagine the other side of the cover, right? Maybe not imagine it really accurately, but at least imagine its presence.

Designers and engineers at Facebook did something really nice with Paper app by adding the tilt feature. Now, when you have a picture that is in the landscape orientation, you don't need to turn your phone, just tilt it. It is amazing how these microinteractions can help our mental model to understand what exists beyond the frames indeed. You are kind of going beyond the frames.

Our phone-reality is really great for pictures, but there is not only photos from your friends vacation on your "pocket screen", right? We do have other kinds of interfaces that requires interactions in different levels. The common detail is that all the interfaces sometimes need to exceed the frames of the smartphone, simply because there is not enough space for all we want inside our screen — even if Apple keep enlarging those potential lightsabers.

How could we, as designers, help our users to understand that there is more things beyond the frame?

This is a detail that I am noticing and giving more attention in the current app I am designing. It is a detail — and I don't need to remember what Eames said about details — that really matters, a smart and tricky one.

A designer need to always remember what is important for his users, so let's build something to work as a hint to make the users understand that the content in our screens goes beyond the frames.

There is more examples we could use to present how designers tell to the users that the content is not over. Below there is some of them from BBC app, Polyvore and Spotify. Those three use the same principle: to show a little bit of the content in order to make the user understand, but without really think about it, that he can scroll/slide and check more information.

Of course, there are some not so good examples too, and they are good for us to learn a little bit more. I will call your attention to the Spotify application again, but this time in the desktop version:

You see that for the same feature presented in the screenshot of the mobile app above, they have a different solution for the desktop. It makes sense to adapt the interaction for the same object in different devices, once they have different features, right?

It is clear to me that the design decision they took was use the arrows (number 1 in the picture above) to present the other options of moods for playlists, and they built it this way because it is obvious that, with a mouse, you would click rather than slide, right? Call me dumb, but it took me some days to see those arrows. Yes. Days.

I don't know if it was the excitement of choosing playlists, or if I was overwhelmed with the information in the screen, but I could not realize there was those arrows to present more options of music. I only saw it when I was really pissed off and sick of the playlists I was listening to, and really need to change to another mood.

"Ohhhhhhhh, this is how I found more playlist mood… Interesting."

The good thing is that I am a good person, and I usually give more chances to people — and apparently to softwares, too. But I was almost switching to 8tracks, which was the previous way I listened to music — a competitor of Spotify. So what?

So Spotify could loose a user because he/she did not see a way to have more options of playlists, and no one wants to keep listening the same playlist for a very long time.

Netflix, even working on desktop, used the same principle of leaving a small portion of the content to help the user find out that there is more content after the end of the screen. Also, they used the arrows to trigger the interaction, once it is hard to slide on desktop. This entire solution was good because kids won't think that Netflix have only seven or eight kinds of cartoon for them to enjoy.

That lesson we all learn in our life, as designers, that we cannot overload our users' screen is true here. But more than that: please, please, please tell him that your app/website/software have more content than those currently appearing in the screen; you can frame it but do not simply crop this experience. Our users are usually human and they are able to imagine, as Manovich said, that there are more content beyond the black frames. But do we need our users to spend their precious time thinking and making tough decisions? Well, not when they are simply listen to music, I think.