Design with manners
3 rules to help us connect with people
I was recently reorganizing my bookshelf and came across a little paperback I’d received right before becoming an RA in college: Choosing Civility by P.M. Forni. It was required reading at the time, ostensibly assigned to groom me and my fellow colleagues for the job. I opened the book and rediscovered its central thesis:
A crucial measure of our success in life is the way we treat one another every day of our lives. When we lessen the burden of those living around us we are doing well; when we add misery to the world we are not. — P.M. Forni
Flipping through the simple (if slightly didactic) pages again got me thinking about the role that manners play in my life.
What are manners anyway? The term conjures formality and old-fashioned etiquette, trite rules and spoon-fed behaviors. But there’s a higher level of compassion that even 19th century-born etiquette writer Emily Post recognized in her day:
Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
— Emily Post
As a designer, I naturally want to make things that people can connect with. I orient myself toward empathy and often sprinkle words like user-centered, human interaction, and emotional into descriptions of what I do.
These descriptions make sense to me intuitively, but there’s something satisfyingly raw about recasting the rules of good design more simply as rules of good manners. Rules that help us connect effectively with other people.
Of all the things we humans crave, feeling heard, respected and validated are among the most visceral. It doesn’t take a lot to fulfill these needs, and in fact, the most basic and passive behaviors are often the most powerful. Three rules from Forni’s list that struck me in this regard: pay attention, listen, and respect people’s time.
How can design embody these rules? A few examples come to mind.
1. Pay attention
A few months ago when I moved to Brooklyn, I used ZocDoc to search for a new doctor in my area. Just as I was basking in the glory of how painless it was to schedule an appointment online, I got an email with some bad news. A glitch in the system caused my appointment to be canceled.
Minutes later, something surprising happened: Someone from ZocDoc’s service team reached out to apologize and offer help, and then proceeded to send me a $10 Amazon gift card for the inconvenience. I hadn’t paid ZocDoc for anything, I hadn’t complained, I hadn’t really done anything. But someone was paying attention to me — how unexpectedly nice.
Every act of kindness is, first of all, an act of attention. — P.M. Forni
2. Listen
Twitter didn’t invent hashtags, @-replies or retweets — the people using it did. If Twitter focused solely on defining its own goals and objectives, it would have missed a big opportunity in filling its users’ most basic needs. Instead, it humbly took a step back, listened to how real people were using the site, and built these interactions into its design. An important reminder that the humble act of listening is a critical part of the design process.
3. Respect people’s time.
Before you started reading this post, Medium gave you an estimate for how many minutes it would take. What a subtle act of consideration that says (without saying): We value your time, we don’t just want to attract your eyeballs, we want your reading experience to be worthwhile.
Paul Ford said it best when he spoke to graduating students at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival:
The time you spend is not your own. You are, as [designers], responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else…you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user’s?
— Paul Ford
