Old Thinking About User Design Wins Out

I think there that well-designed applications owe more to Art than Science. Remember how different Google and Facebook were to other applications that we around at the time and how the simplicity of their design stood out from some of the cluttered and confused applications that had evolved through the accretion of functionality.

I was reminded of this because of a recent experience when someone brought my attention to a piece of work where a well-known narrative was translated into emojis.

An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication such as the smiley faces that you use in instant messaging.  Emojis are modern-day hieroglyphics, An enterprising individual, Joe Hale, has created special emojis and used them to make a four-foot-tall Wonderland emoji Poster that tells the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Here is an example of his translation of the ‘Alice’ text to a set of images. If we use ‘Do Cats Eat Bats?’ It appears as:

Another example: ‘And how do you know that you’re mad?’

There is a whole poster worth of this approach.

Joe believes the idea, ‘"Alice in Wonderland translated into emoji," is powerful enough to create images in the reader's mind's eye, and anybody curious enough can develop these images into their own personal Wonderland in their head and escape to that place.' He adds 'People should just use my poster as a visual aid to think about Wonderland, trip out and explore their imagination. Or: be inspired to read some Lewis Carroll!’

The entire 'Alice' story has been reimagined in this fashion. Alice in Wonderland is such a well-known story that there are sequels and reimaginings in film, animation and books but his idea that you could look at the story in its entirety as a poster was unexpected. After 150 years people are coming up with new ways of representing the story.

His approach is extremely user-centric for a younger generation who read from phones and tablets and take their information in different sized chunks than that of previous generations.  Presenting the information this way opens up new ways of reading the story.

150 years old (Alice in Wonderland)  in literature is about 10 in technology terms. The emoji 'Alice in Wonderland'  makes me curious why mainstream technology often uses the same mechanisms and narratives to present to and communicate with the users that it was using more than 20 years ago. The interactive design of applications has not progressed much from the original design book that Apple provided to explain how menus, icons, buttons should be laid out. Alan Cooper's book in 1995, 'About Face',  was a bible for application developers getting to grips with a new way of presenting applications that were no longer command line driven. Today, a lot of the applications that are heavily used by the public could have been written 20 years ago using old technology and old thinking. My online tax system does not remember preferences from year to year whereas most people's tax affairs are unchanged. Banking systems have all my data but provide no analysis of my spending habits (book, food, travel and entertainment) when I log on. It seems that much of current design is based around copying competitors or redesigning an identical product from scratch.

The users have evolved but the suppliers seem to be trapped into frameworks and models that do not permit change easily. Duplication of the look and is not standardisation or consistency when it repeats the flaws of the original. We may not end up with emoji driven applications but we should anticipate that the static, corporate, brochure look-and-feel of applications is under threat.

The poster is available online at http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster