The Cadence & Slang of Good User Interaction

Designer and author Nick Disabato on interface familiarity, product personality, Slap Chop marketing, and the present and future of interaction design.

Nick Disabato is a user interaction designer. An independent, he works with clients to help them create or fine-tune the products, apps, and systems they create.

In 2008, as a young designer, Disabato set out to create a chapbook of evergreen design principles for user interaction and experience. That chapbook became Cadence & Slang, a short, high level statement of principles about how to design every aspect of a product. It was one of the first publishing projects on Kickstarter and it did well. Now, Disabato has returned to the book, updating and revising the text (and design) in response to the changing landscape of UX. (There’s a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition too, it ends August 9.)

Thoughtful Design: What are ‘cadence’ and ‘slang’ in UX?

Disabato: I separate the book into two sections. “Cadence” covers the rhythms we get into when we’re immersed in productive work with technology; “Slang” discusses the visual and interactional languages of an interface. Both cadence and slang are always in some sort of relationship with one another, affecting our habits and expectations.

TD: I was surprised to find myself in Chapter 1 of a book on UI reading advice on customer service.

Disabato: It is a little unusual, yeah? But I think it’s important enough to consider, and customer service and marketing seem to get neglected enough that I chose to put them first.

I believe someone’s experience involves every parameter of the product, from the marketing to the customer service to the product itself. I work with a lot of companies that put together amazing products, but they haven’t updated their marketing sites since the Crimean War. That isn’t a good way to speak to prospective customers; at best, it doesn’t make for a good first impression.

More broadly, user experience is a question of empathy. You can have an empathetic interface, but that should also be supported by an empathetic company.

Normally, writing a professional text is not how you break into a field.

TD: What led you to publish C&S the first time?

Disabato: I knew I always wanted to be an interaction designer, but it was hard breaking into the field. At the time, there weren’t many junior-level UX jobs in Chicago, so I was working as a front-end developer. I had an HCI degree, and wasn’t really putting it to good use. I decided to research as much as I could about the field and put together a book about it.

Normally, writing a professional text is not how you break into a field; by the time you’re writing a book, you’ve probably done some sort of important work that warrants it. So I’m well aware that I went out of order, as it were. But Cadence & Slang is also fairly high-level, geared for the type of junior designer or casual enthusiast that I was at the time.

It began very slowly as an overall statement of purpose that I distributed as a 16-page chapbook to close friends. A few of them liked it and told me to keep pursuing the ideas in it, so then I created the outline for Cadence & Slang that formed the set of overall principles in the book. Then I would research every one of them and write justifications for each.

The second edition accounts for touch screens and mobile more strongly; in 2008, we didn’t have a really mature grammar around discussing that sort of interaction model. Now we do.

For the second edition, I spent relatively little time going over older research, instead choosing to focus on all of the conversations that have recently taken place around touch screens, flat design, and “post-PC” computing. That allowed me to figure out what to edit, and how to add to it.

TD: You talk about the slang of different media. What’s characteristic of post-PC touchscreen slang?

Disabato: Multi-touch makes it so you effectively have ten “cursors” on your hands, which goes against the notion of having a single-cursor mouse. In removing the mouse as a pointing device, you’re also effectively removing a middleman between your body and the device you’re controlling, but there are tradeoffs.Tap targets need to be larger and less precise, with more spacing between them. You need fewer elements on the screen, which can force a lot of difficult design decisions. You don’t have the luxury of Fitts’s Law, where the corners and edges can contain your most oft-hit OS-level controls; but you do have the ability to perform edge swipes—especially on Android devices, and to some extent in the upcoming iOS 7.

Currently, touch devices have a lot less horsepower than the laptops and desktops we use. We have to be really careful about the way we use memory and processing speed; the operating systems we write for are capable of killing our applications in the background. So not only are you paring back the things you see on a screen, but you are also limiting the computational scope of the software. This might change in the distant future, but I don’t envision it happening within the next few generations of hardware. We all need to get used to dealing with less powerful machines.

TD: Do you spend much time thinking about future interfaces?

Disabato: Pretty often. Academic literature loves thinking about notional future interfaces, so I end up reading a fair amount in ACM journals, arXiv, that sort of thing. But I’m skeptical of those things if they don’t actually ship to real customers.

Instead, I love thinking about the possibilities of our technology today. Between mobile and smart, “Internet of Things”–y devices, I don’t think there’s been a better time to consider the untapped, immediate possibilities of what technology can afford for us.

Every couple of months, I see a new interaction model that makes me rethink the possibilities of mobile devices. Gestural systems, like the ones that Clear and Fantastical have, show me that there are a lot of interesting ways to play with data. I’ve also played games like Eliss, Osmos, and Ridiculous Fishing that simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for relatively affordable multi-touch devices and application platforms. I don’t see that kind of reinvention happening on desktop systems right now.

I’m also fascinated by the proliferation of cheap devices that can talk to all of these devices. Nest, Twine, and Tile all can work with my phone to control my home and keep track of my possessions. I think that’s really interesting, both from hardware and software standpoints—the sensors are only as good as the interfaces capable of parsing them. And we have the capability to make both hardware and software of our own, relatively cheaply, now that Arduino and Raspberry Pi are widespread and have large communities.

TD: There’s been talk with new networked objects about giving them personality. I’m thinking in particular of BERG’s Be as Smart as a Puppy, but more generally the ideas and concerns that surround living in society with these machines. Thoughts?

Disabato: Yeah, that’s a great way of framing it. I think that also strips away some of the interface considerations of a given product and makes us think of what it does for the user. If you get the overall objectives and tone of something right early on, then it makes it easier to define its scope and actually develop it later.

Even my to-do list has a sophisticated, cross-platform syncing system.

I think people turn to any software not because it looks cool or has really insane functionality, but because it helps them solve a need in their lives. Perhaps looking cool or being professional-grade is what’s needed to accomplish that, but it sort of comes indirectly.

As that applies to sensor-connected devices, I believe in the future almost everything is going to be connected to each other in some way. My phone is currently streaming to speakers across the room; my projector talks to iTunes on my server and serves up video. Even my to-do list has a sophisticated, cross-platform syncing system that is firing constantly—and that’s effectively just a text file.

Real-world sensing is only one facet of the broader issue, which is that all of the technology in our lives is getting more intelligent. As these things become more thoroughly woven into our lives, I think giving them personality—as BERG does with BASAAP and Little Printer, and MailChimp does throughout their product—only helps us feel happier when we’re engaging with technology, making it feel less like a chore.

TD: I feel like this comes back to you opening a book on UX with customer service advice. In a world of always on, always present, always active objects, UX has to account for every waking moment, more or less.

Disabato: It does, yeah. And people are paying attention to the service (and the personality!) of products quite a bit now.

It isn’t enough to just make something that is usable; those were the table stakes in this industry a decade ago. A good product should be the reflection of its creators’ personality, and it should hopefully make us feel happier while still providing whatever intrinsic value it’s supposed to.

If you lean too much on your personality, it might be because your product doesn’t have any utility to back up your claims.

TD: When you talk about marketing, you have some negative things to say about ads that promote the product without really talking about its features. At the same time, that lifestyle branding is part of imbuing a product with personality, wouldn’t you say?

Disabato: That’s a really good question. I think good advertising should strike a balance between saying what a product is, what it does, and how it feels. A lot of advertising gets only one of those right; two, if it’s lucky. It is not an easy problem to solve, but you run the risk of being misleading if you don’t hit the mark on all three fronts.

Put a little differently, I believe you can have “lifestyle branding” without also glossing over what the product does. If you lean too much on your personality, it might be because your product doesn’t have any utility to back up your claims.

I also see a lot of products using language that has almost lost all meaning in the industry: “simple,” “fun,” “easy to use.” Of course you want your product to be simple, fun, and easy to use. What parts of the product make it that way?

TD: It seems like products like the Slap Chop have a perfect marketing program (if a terrible actual product).

Disabato: I’m actually fascinated by some of those made-for-TV products; they have such effective marketing! They get you so excited about the thing.

And they work to kill off every objection you might have about buying a product, as quickly as possible. Not necessary in your kitchen? Look how much time it saves you! Too expensive? Here’s ten other things we’re adding on for free.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about marketing pages lately, for a service my consultancy has put together. Almost all of the best ones try to come up with common questions their prospective customers have, and they work to kill off every problem you may have with buying something. To bring this back to technology, I don’t know how you can design such an effective campaign without showing the utility – just as Ron Popeil did in his commercials in the sixties and seventies, but maybe in the service of something a little less frivolous (and less prone to breakage) than the Slap Chop.

TD: You talked about some of the exciting experiments in interaction design on mobile. It seems like that kind of work is somewhat at odds with making programs that behave as we’d expect them to; if it’s experimental, it’s going to be unexpected at first. When you’re working on a UI, do you worry about a cognitive cost for learning new gestures/interactions within the context of the slang of the overall OS/UX landscape?

Disabato: The short answer: Yes, I worry about that all the time.

The long answer: Everybody has a certain degree of familiarity with a product, and that can be affected by their experience with the platform it’s on. For example, people are probably much more fluent with new iOS apps if they’ve already owned an iPhone for a year, but novices to iPhones (and touch screens in general) will be less so.

Over time, these users—and, in fact, all users—will become more acclimated to dealing with the resident slang of an iOS platform, and they will be more likely to experiment. This means you will have to spend less time hand-holding the person through complicated sets of instructions or demonstrations, and you will be able to design more unfamiliar interactions that push the possibilities of the medium.

I think a lot of good design work comes from knowing how comfortable people are going to be with your product, and knowing what you can do to account for anything unusual you might implement.