“How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?”
This is the prompt that underpins this entire course.
Confession #1:
I have one post on my Instagram. I only have an Instagram account because my friends forced me to one night at a going-away dinner.
My only post is a photo of my pasta from that dinner.
Images from my personal Instagram
Confession #2:
Way back in around 2011-2012, I had an Instagram account. My cousin forced me to make it (are you seeing a pattern here?) and I only agreed because of the filters. I thought it was a photo editing app. You can’t blame me; at the time, I was 13-14, I had a Nokia phone, and photo sharing was still a new thing.
Why was it new? Because smartphones were expensive. And because the network was decentralised.
I had a FanFiction.Net account when I was around 13-14 (apparently a very formative period of my internet existence). I wrote tiny little one-shots in the Harry Potter universe and my audience consisted of maybe ten readers who randomly stumbled across my fics along with my cousin, two high school friends, and one primary school friend.
My archaic Instagram account and my cringeworthy FanFiction.Net accounts did not share the same audience. They were individual spheres, orbiting in their own tiny universes.
Nowadays, the network is far more centralised. I can sign up to everything from Snapchat to Candy Crush through my Facebook, my Twitter, my Google account. My YouTube account is directly linked to my Gmail. Tinder can connect with Spotify can connect with Facebook. Everything is connected. But now, everything looks the same.
Even though I have barely touched the Instagram of 2018, I could probably just figure it out by applying my knowledge from other apps. The heart icon probably means ‘like’, something I learned from the now irrelevant We Heart It. Those bubbles at the top of my feed are probably some variation of the ‘stories’ found in Snapchat and Facebook, collated photos and videos that last 24 hours. If it’s like any mobile app ever, I can swipe up and down to scroll through posts. Slowly but surely, apps are beginning to look more and more like each other.
If design is contagious, are individual designs like diseases? Is the lack of innovation a bad thing? In terms of progress and creativity and originality, yes. But in terms of usability, perhaps no. Apps copy each others’ designs because they have been tried and tested. Additionally, by having similar designs, skills are transferrable from one app to another, offering instant familiarity to users, negating the awkward, fumbly learning stage.
Confession #3:
To this day, the numbers on a TV remote baffle me. When I was younger, I had an old box TV in my bedroom and one day, I just decided to press a bunch of numbers. All I got was ants on my screen. So I pressed more buttons. More ants. ‘Without feedback, one is always wondering whether anything has happened…Feedback is critical.’ (Norman 1998, p.xii) I still don’t watch TV. Now I wonder if it’s because I never figured out the remote.
In Donald A. Norman’s ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ (1998) it was strange to read about the early computers and how unintuitive they were. A blank screen with absolutely no indication of where to start or what to do? That would paralyse me too.
Norman (1998, p.82) writes that ‘problems occur whenever there is more than one possibility’, and this quote reminded me of about two weeks ago when I played my first game of Dungeons and Dragons. I felt so out of my element, so unsure of my actions, because the possibilities were endless and the game’s design was not very friendly to the new user. No UI. Lots of jargon. All the abbreviations on the character sheet alone was like learning a new language. When our party came across a snare, even though I told the DM I walked around it, apparently because I hadn’t been at the front of the line when we saw the snare, I didn’t know the snare was there (rhyme) and hence couldn’t walk around it.
…Well how was I supposed to know that? Nothing on my character sheet, in the 30 page ‘condensed’ rulebook I hastily skimmed, or in the DM’s instructions had warned me that what was seen and heard by one member of the party, and hence announced to the entire table, was not automatically known by other members.
By the end of the session, I was passed out on the couch just from the stress of making decisions. Poor design, really. (I was actually just sick but shhh.)
The idea that people were once so baffled by computers astounds me, but that’s my youth and upbringing talking. My dad is an electronic engineer so I grew up with computers. I have had my own computer since I was about seven years old. Norman (1998, p.180) writes ‘the best computer programs are the ones in which the computer itself “disappears”, in which you work directly on the problem without having to be aware of the computer.’ This is how it has always been for me. I remember telling my dad once how using a mouse felt as natural as using my hands. Now I realise, this is not the case for everyone.
Everything I read this week about human-centred design and constraints and affordances is taking me back to Year 12 Product Design and Technology (or Textiles, for short). When you get down to fundamentals, designing a steampunk Alice in Wonderland costume really isn’t that different to designing a photo-sharing social media app.
From D&D to Discord, design concepts like affordances and constraints, feedback and visibility, are everywhere. But being aware of them can not only help explain the increasing centralisation of the network, but also why navigating the intricate, invisible internet is somehow easier for me than navigating an IRL conversation.
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References:
Norman, D 1998, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York.