You check your phone. Half an hour later, you look up and wonder what you were trying to do.
You take some notes on your phone, but never look back on them, and can’t even remember making them.
You use an app ‘for free’, only to realise too late that the company was making money off all the information you were putting into it — often without realising.
We ought to be more careful about how we use technology because people are increasingly manipulating us with it.
But the old “limit your use” wisdom is ironically limited in its application…
Trying to fit a datatable into an email is like trying to fit an elephant into a fridge — no matter how much you try, it ain’t gonna budge!
The question quickly becomes, do we really need this? (Which is actually a great question, because much of the time, we don’t.)
Can’t we just put it on a website and have users click through to it? No, don’t make me click more than I need to, and don’t make me think! And no, don’t put my sensitive information on your website — it’s in enough places already!
It got me…
Problem
Most clients will at some point want to include a massive data table within your email.
Problem is, while it looks great on a desktop, with usually around 80% of emails read on a small mobile device, this is what they’ll be seeing:
I previously wrote about the problem of our very angry and divided online experience, and unpacked where conflict comes from.
Very briefly, conflict comes from differences we see in others, and we can control our response to these differences.
You can be highly assertive without being aggressive. You can be highly empathetic without ignoring issues. That is, instead of the fight or flight responses to conflict, we can choose a third way: we can make peace.
My main point was:
to improve users’ experiences we need to actively encourage peace, rather than just bring people together, or remove people who…
Where we’ve come from: selfish to other’s-centric
The web has grown up a lot. Like a baby it has grown from learning to grasp the first few words (of HTML) to, a few years later, toddling with newfound legs (Javascript). I think we’ve finally passed that awkward moment of running gleefully butt-naked with nappy in hand (the insecurity of Flash-ing everyone)!
With this growing collection of tools, though, we saw every problem through that lens. When we wanted a website we only looked at the tools we had and the functions we wanted. It was a selfish time and it produced very poor experiences.
Enter Steve Jobs…
Nathan Keen
Front-End Dev; UX Designer; INTJ “Architect”
