Understanding the future of the Web: it’s cards everywhere
By Linda Holliday, Founder/CEO, Citia
1.We Baby Einsteins logged thousands of hours manipulating cards — our first significant media (blocks, meh). It’s now deeply intuitive.
2. A card is a thumbnail for something else. We get that.
3. Cards might be THE most efficient media format for skimming and browsing.
4. Our human memory is visual and 3-D. Cards suit us.
5. Card experiences can be more ergonomical for hand, eye, and neck. Bye-bye bobble-heading through long web pages.
6. They’re darn practical too. From wristwatch to wide screen, cards can easily be arranged in one to many column
1. Who doesn’t love cards?
Yes, it started early between us.
Small, modular, consistent, multi-purpose objects for organizing, play, learning, sharing, counting.
As we booted up our brains, we used media that was highly visual and physical. And we know now that a certain kind of problem-solving intelligence comes only in brains well trained in manipulating things physically.
We all intuitively understand cards deeply — from playing childhood games to poker to serious experiences with snapshots and thumbnails.
We stack, share, sort, organize, fling. And, importantly, we understand cards as concepts and symbols for real and unreal heroes and monsters, banks, places and recipes, numbers and books.
2. The card as a modern tool has roots that go back millennia
We may not be born so, but learning to see includes making the conceptual leap that the small thing is the faraway big thing. Becoming conscious of this might have taken until 5 B.C., when the Greeks tried to draw what they saw.
Enter foreshortening: the little object now stands for the big object. Around 1850, we got the idea of the “tiny drawing.” Thumbnails could stand in for reality, narrative, or art.
We understand that small things lack detail (an insight probably rooted in the limitations of human sight). Get close up for more detail, more meaning.
Layer that sense of scale and you have semantic zooming: maps and content maps that let you toggle between small, medium, and large. (At CITIA we think of these more as mindsets than forms: Skim, Grok, and Master.
3. Cards can be simple and cards can be quantum
Cards are great for skimming and browsing, but they can break with the physical metaphor and become—almost anything.
Digital cards can ape most of the activities of physical cards. But when cards go digital — they can become quantum objects. Their rules and their physics are limited only by our imagination, and maybe our skill and budget.
Today, in most interfaces, cards are still glued to the glass. Sure, you might see a little drop shadow, a turned up corner…
Yes, of course, digital cards can play media and be dynamic and take your money. Some cards can flip and be flung. Smarter cards can also become frames for pages and let other long-form material scroll or page inside.
The fanciest cards can be portals or wormholes taking us to other places, other cards, other experiences.
4. Humans have a superior operating system — for humans
Hyper-linking or pogo-sticking our way around digital realms may never be very intuitive. We literally get “lost in space,” nauseous, or both. It’s like remembering phone numbers or directions — human brains are just not optimized that way. We can do it, but it hurts.
That’s because our human OS is visual and spatial — 3D!
Important new research proves our brains are literally hard-wired with a grid system. We easily understand physical spaces like cities and streets and libraries because they trigger our grid cells and reference memories.
Space without human references can be disorienting. As Nicholas Carr posits in The Shallows digital infoscapes with no physicality poorly support cognition. Maybe there’s a way to make navigating less uncomfortable, more memorable. Maybe there are new ways that digital interfaces can support humans. The card can help.
5. Card experiences can be more ergonomic for the hand, the eye, and the neck
Life in the media flow can be like window shopping on Madison Avenue from a taxi doing 40 mph. You can do it, but it hurts.
The same experience as a slide show would be much easier on the eyes and neck. Memorability would no doubt increase.
Now consider: Cards move, we don’t. Subtle — but profound.
Cards or stacks of cards can move, can be flung off the screen. But the viewer’s focal point stays centered. Important! Bye-bye infinite scroll bobble head.
And on a smartphone, designs like Citia’s, or now Tinder’s, can be absolutely delightful on the eye and the thumb. Try it. The one-handed phone gesture is really one-thumbed.
Fling. Fling. Fling. Fling.
6. Last but not least — cards work on screens of any size
Really, a screen is just a screen.
And we’ll use whatever is handy. Breaking Bad on the phone? Yelp on the Samsung Smart TV? We do it all. And we’ll do more — watches, glasses, dashboards.
But how does non-video content stay pleasant and memorable from 2” to 54”?
Cards line up and lay out wherever we put them. In a long column on a narrow phone. Shoulder to shoulder in stacks on a tablet. Across a big grid on the big screen. From columns and rows to piles and decks — cards assemble themselves…fluidly, easily, memorably.
And whenever they appear their mechanics just work: sort, stack, discard. Nice.
