Embracing Asymmetrical Design An Article by Ben Nadel www.bennadel.com Humans love symmetry. We find symmetry to be very attractive. Our brains may even be hard-wired through evolution to process symmetrical data more efficiently. So, it's no surprise that, as designers, we try to build symmetry into our product interfaces and layouts. It makes them feel very pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, data is not symmetrical…Once you release a product into "the real world", and users start to enter "real world data" into it, you immediately see that asymmetrical data, shoe-horned into a symmetrical design, can start to look terrible. To fix this, we need to lean into an asymmetric reality. We need to embrace the fact that data is asymmetric and we need to design user interfaces that can expand and contract to work with the asymmetry, not against it. To borrow from Bruce Lee, we need to build user interfaces that act more like water: “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” — Bruce Lee The pernicious issue with pangramsChanging Our Development Mindset datainterfaces
Reverse chronology bias Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything. So they didn’t. And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong. The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before. There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. Amy Hoy, How the Blog Broke the Web Navigation by shibboleth timequirks