Benjamin Grosser
What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook
A Research Paper by Benjamin GrosserWhat are the effects of this enumeration, of these metrics that count our social interactions? In other words, how are the designs of Facebook leading us to act, and to interact in certain ways and not in others? For example, would we add as many friends if we weren’t constantly confronted with how many we have? Would we “like” as many ads if we weren’t told how many others liked them before us? Would we comment on others’ statuses as often if we weren’t told how many friends responded to each comment?
In this paper, I question the effects of metrics from three angles. First I examine how our need for personal worth, within the confines of capitalism, transforms into an insatiable “desire for more.” Second, with this desire in mind, I analyze the metric components of Facebook’s interface using a software studies methodology, exploring how these numbers function and how they act upon the site’s users. Finally, I discuss my software, born from my research-based artistic practice, called Facebook Demetricator (2012-present). Facebook Demetricator removes all metrics from the Facebook interface, inviting the site’s users to try the system without the numbers and to see how that removal changes their experience. With this free web browser extension, I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality produced through metrics, enabling a social media culture less dependent on quantification.
Beyond Artboards
The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.
Can't developers just see?
We designers love artboards. From rough UI sketches to high fidelity mockups, we see ourselves as visual artists expressing ideas on artboards that have a pre-defined width and height. To start a new project, we declare the size of the artboard in the first step.
What about responsive design? Not a problem! We diligently design on three artboards — one for mobile, one for tablet, and one for desktop — with content elegantly adapting, scaling, reflowing, reordering, and reprioritizing. We proudly hand off the artboards to developers while patting ourselves on the back: this is how responsive design should be done.
After weeks of arduous engineering, the product finally comes out. We find, to our great dismay, that some copy is hanging off the grid, the focal point of the hero image has been cropped out, the font sizes don’t even come close to the type ramp. What went wrong? Can’t the developers just see everything on all those artboards?
Nope.
We are the ones who paved the path
No matter how many screen sizes our artboards account for, some user’s browser will break loose from our prescription. With users resizing, rotating, and zooming the screen, new devices stretching, squashing, curving, and cutting (e.g. the speaker area in iPhone X) the screen, the sizes become infinite. Good luck making an artboard for each one of them.
Artboards are a lossy format. Using artboards in a handoff is a lossy process. When we pitch a finite number of plans against an infinite number of situations. We inevitably get in-betweens. Once there are in-betweens, there are unknowns. Once there are unknowns there is guesswork. Once there is guesswork, there are surprises. Engineers take the path of least resistance. We are ones who paved the path.
Until we get there
- As a designer, learn writing HTML, or better still, semantic HTML. If coding up the entire design is too hard, try coding up one component at a time, and not worrying about CSS. The HTML alone will prove invaluable for developers to understand the content structure. In addition, you are forced to optimize the information architecture as you work out the code from content.
- If coding by yourself is out of the question, pair up with the engineer who will receive the design. Work closely with him or her to prototype the design, validate responsive behaviors, and obtain feedback on the feasibility. Don’t call it an iteration until the design has seen played with in code.
- As a manager for large enterprise, co-locate your designers and developers, encourage interdisciplinary learning, understand that each minute spent on coding before the handoff translates to ten minutes saved from changing and fixing issues after the handoff.
- As a stakeholder in the handoff meeting, give the designer a thumbs-up when he or she demos live code running in browsers in place of mockups on artboards. That’s a design champion you are looking at.