Design Verbs, Not Nouns

This is the second part in a series of articles dealing with UX and this playful, yet mysterious little idea I like to call Design Verbs, Not Nouns. If You find it mysterious enough to read the next ones, You should probably follow me on Medium.

This isn’t a talk about technology

I like to think that making computers do stuff is more of a soft skill, rather than someone’s main occupation. An internet TV platform for a big Pharma company, awesome publishing tools magically putting Your blog on someones’ phone, or an old wardrobe covered with Christmas lights used for photography, which I like to call the Rainbotron™ — these are things supported by computers. However, their underlying fabric is not a mysterious language formed of 1s and 0s. It’s creativity, and most importantly — hard work.

So, I don’t want to talk about technology. What I want to talk about is this little problem I have, which are:

Big things

And the big things I have in mind are not:

Big Data

Miniaturisation, gone wrong.

It’s complexity.

My uncle was a lumberjack. I remember listening to him praising this one, ultimate tool, he could use to do any type of work — his axe.

Alternative title: “Our Bright Future”

And although it might sound a bit silly at first, an axe is a crude, brutal tool after all, and his fingers were a bit shorter than they were supposed to, I got his point. In his case, most of his work could be done just with an axe.

To him it was an axe, as much as a hammer, or a stick to lean on. It made complete sense.

So what’s the lesson from that? Let me explain it with these three pictures:

Picture #1: One of the first things that comes to my head when I think about ENIAC is that it was huge, it was magnificent. It was big. Lights would dim in New York as it was crunching numbers.

Picture #2: Eventually, decades and decades of amazing discoveries later, this thing came about:

The modern computer

The modern operating system, to me at least, was this magical box, filled with tiny, mysterious tools. You could draw, write, record Your own voice, play games, or improve Your Minesweeper skills at work!

It was a box, it was a place, it was — an object.

But then, suddenly, this thing happened:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Picture #3: It was a gradual thing, You know. And it was a sign of desperation. Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant, was as terrible at guiding users, as it excelled in being this one thing into which You could channel all of Your internalised hatred, anger and dissatisfaction with work. Clippy was a desperate measure taken to fix a broken interface. It was something big.

Big.

Clippy lived in this house. Because a computer program, as opposed to an app, is a place, an environment we enter to solve problems. Since this environment is a set of different tasks, features, it could be possibly split into smaller ones, decoupled.

And the decoupled features could be remixed, rearranged.

We could also pick just a few we find helpful.

Or the one we need.

And this process is an example of something that happened a bit later. It happened to mobile and web:

This is a screenshot of an iPad home screen I found on an internet forum, for some reason, dealing with iPad home screens. I also learned that about 50% of them are pictures of Mariah Carey. A part of me hopes that this knowledge will prove helpful in my future, for instance, by saving my life during an epic adventure.

When I take a closer look at it, what strikes me is that almost every single app represents a single activity:

I use the camera app to snap photos, Messenger to PM my friends, Music to — listen to music! That’s all.

Single activities could be composed to create workflows, like this one:

1. I open Instagram to share some photos of the bespoke, artisan, man-bun shaped loaf of bread I acquired in the organic food market near Brick Lane (East London).
2. I tweet the link, so my @iBakedThatBeforeItWasCool followers, so they can share the fun.
3. They love it. I set up an event on Eventbrite, so we can have a crazy Artisan Bread party.

Every single action here can be described with a verb.

(also, I wish crazy Artisan Bread Parties were a thing)

But hey, Photoshop is a verb.
- one of my multiple personalities, called Gustav, arguing with me.

Dear Gustav, PM is an activity — an “atomic” interaction. Photoshop isn’t. The verb to photoshop covers just a single aspect of a space, thing, that could be used for web design, print, analysing X-Ray scans, developing photos, simulating colour blindness…

Or “randomising” political correctness:

This is how verbs work

The complicated part is finding the right tool. Is it Axe Africa, or my uncle’s axe? Then, the number of choices we have to make gets smaller. The cognitive effort is reduced.

This is how {some} nouns work

1. We start with the program. It might be easier to find the right one than in the previous example, but it might be easier to be misled.
2. We’re looking for the right solution.
3. We try to define the problem.
4. We are suggested some solutions on the way, some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are — random.

Summary

1. Design Verbs, Not Nouns.

Build things that would require a new word added to the dictionary, and made this word a verb.

2. Design atomic interactions.

• I believe that favouring small, composable interactions is a way more natural, humane way of designing things.
• I believe that both grand, and small ideas are opinionated, but it’s more of an issue with the former.
• I believe that an ideal(-istic) way of solving a problem, would be creating an atomic (as non-separable, the leanest possible) interaction.

3. Compose.

Let users create their own programs, by building apps that are more focused. Why? Because everyone has an axe somewhere.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

What next?

We will cover an example of these ideas put in practice in the next article of this series, but if You happen to be as impatient as I am, check Façade. Façade makes rainbows.