Think Desire

(this post was written by Kyle on April 22, 2005, and it concerns & & & )

[Originally posted on MuchTooMuch]

Why hasn’t Apple changed the way we experience the Web?

It wouldn’t be difficult for it to do. It wouldn’t depend on a new standard that needs acceptance, nor any work on the side of site designers. It also wouldn’t need a plug-in to work. All the company would have to do is think different for a moment, and then pay a few programmers to simply and greatly increase the pleasure of owning an Apple computer, and by increasing that pleasure, increase its value.

At no charge to us users of course.

Here’s why what I’m going to propose makes sense. First, Apple already has the graphic underpinnings to achieve this. Second, Apple has already done most of the conceptual/programmatic legwork. And third, Apple has already committed itself to the metaphor I’m going to propose, and so it would seem as a natural evolution of the Apple user experience — as with any evolutionary development, it makes sense and seems like it should have been predicted, but it still changes everything.

Here’s an example that explains why we need to change the experience.


Imagine that you’re reading this web-page. Now, see one of those links in the right-hand sidebar? Imagine that you click on one of those.

(If you’re still here, congratulations. You understand the meaning of the word “imagine.”)

In a regular old browser, if you clicked on that, a couple of different things might happen, depending on your browser and preferences. You might see this page turn white, and then watch the new page slowly built itself on the blank page. Your browser might stay on this page and not take you to the next page until it’s already downloaded all the data and “set itself up” before it “takes you” to that next page. If it does this, there’s probably, depending on your connection, a noticeable pause between clicking on the link and “being taken” to the new page. During this pause, your browser might freeze or it might let you keep scrolling on the original page.

Regardless of what you browser does, however, there is a pause between this page and that page. Which means that, unless you’ve got some strange plug-in that most web users have never heard of and probably wouldn’t how to install if they had heard of it, your experience with the Web is something less than continuous. Between clicking a link and the loading of that linked information, there is always a noticeable break.

Frustrating is a good word for this experience. Look at that word, experience that word. All those consonants, forcing you to slow down and ar-tic-u-late. The way the air from the first vowel gets caught in the strurl between the tensed tongue and pursling lips. Everything about the word frustrating embodies the experience of frustration.

But maybe better than that, it also embodies the reason why we still experience frustration with the Web. We experience frustration every time we say the word frustration, but we accept it because:

  1. It would be too difficult to get everyone else to agree to change the word,
  2. The roots of our English language necessarily predicate us towards accepting a certain level of frustration with our language, and
  3. It’s not that big of a deal anyway because its only the pronunciation of one single word within a larger sentence, and we’ve got better things to be worried about.

In other words, your experience on the Web is frustrating because:

  1. Standards are too difficult to impose (thankfully)
  2. Web browsers are built by a group of people who, while brilliant, are necessarily forced to think in a formal, technical manner, and
  3. The people who normally would worry about something like this are off discussing much bigger things like , the , , , and stuff like that.

Which just leaves us.

Now, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you have some sort of emotional stake in at least one of two things. The first is the Mac interface. While its true that anyone can read this post, I’m betting that you’re either on a Mac or wish you were, and that there’s just something about the Mac interface that makes you feel better when you use a computer. Sure, it’s not perfect, and it seems true that there was a serious step back with OS X, but its still true that it feels better than the competition.

Of course, I shouldn’t continue until I attempt to support that statement about the step back with OS X, and in fact, it has a significant effect on my proposal.
I want to say, first, that I like many of the things we gained with OS X. Most of them increased my efficiency tenfold (thank you Finder Sidebar!), but most of them also decreased my feeling like I was working with the computer; that is, they made me feel a certain disconnect between what end goal I wanted to achieve and how that goal was achieved.

The classic GUI, while slow and in definite need of some major retooling, made me forget that there was a computer between me and my goal. It wasn’t about automation or instantaneous results, but about the way I worked with the computer; or maybe it’s the way the computer worked with me; or maybe its the way the computer and I worked together. It seemed like an open space, that there was a depth that I reached into. And that there was a computer there to help me anytime I got lost.

There was the work to be done and I had to do the work. And when I needed help with the work, there was a computer there to help me out, and we did it together.
But with OS X, it seems like there is work to be done and that I have to tell the computer to do it. But I don’t speak the computers language, so I have to think like it in order to get anything done. And thinking like a computer does not come naturally to me. So, while I get more done with OS X and in a lesser amount of time, working with the computer frustrates me now.

It used to be a pleasure.
Now it’s work.
That’s a step back in my opinion.

Now, if you don’t have an emotional stake in the Mac GUI, there’s a good chance that you have an emotional stake in the Web. You’re reading a ridiculously long blog post, after all, and if you’ve come this far, it seems fair to assume that you’re willing to spend a significant part of your leisure time on the Web, especially since the post is about how the experience of that leisure time can improve.

Which brings us to the idea. Sorry it took this long, but we had to weed out all those people that I’m not talking to. Those people that aren’t you.

What is it that I like about the OS X GUI?

I like its name. Aqua.

As you may have guessed by now, I’m rather into words. They mean a hell of a lot to me. I had a professor once who said that words are precious things. That we should hold them back, use them wisely. That we should hoard our store of words and spend them only when absolutely necessary. To this professor, words are objects, and our relationship with them should be economical.

I don’t feel that way about words. To me, words aren’t things. They have meaning, as much meaning as I do and as much meaning as You do. My relationship to them is moral. I don’t want them to be what they don’t mean. But I realize that I can’t control them. I don’t own the words. They have a life beyond me.

For example, my description of frustration above. That’s the frustration that I know, the one that I have experience with. I don’t know if you know the same frustration. If not, you and I are talking about two different frustrations.

It’s as if I was telling you a story about Joe, and I said, “Joe is a funny guy.” And you said, “No, he’s not. He’s actually a prick.” And I said, “Joe Attabularto?” And you said, “No, Joe Plummer.” And I said, “Oh. I’m talking about a different Joe.” And you said, “Oh. I know Joe Attabularto. Yeah. He’s kinda funny.” And I said, “Then you don’t know Joe.”

The last name in the above example represents the history of that person. Joe Attabularto came from or joined the Attabularto family-tree, which is nothing but a representation of a continuous and linear “narrative” of Joe’s history. It places him along a specific line in all the possible lines we could draw in the constantly flowing form of Time.

Your experience with Joe represent those points in Time where your unique line intersects with his. My experience with Joe represent those points where we intersect. But my intersecting points differ from yours, so even though we know the same Joe according to that line, we know different Joes according the intersecting points.

Now, is Joe the line, or is he the points? If he’s the line, then neither you or I know Joe. And if he’s the points, then wouldn’t it make more sense to call those points by different names? And wouldn’t that get pretty annoying real fast? Kinda like this semi-tangent?

A part of what I’m getting at here is that I love words and that I think of them as people and that the relationship I have with them is based on my experience with them.

The reason I love Aqua is because I love the experience I have watching it do its thing. Aqua, to me, is not the brushed steel or the faded lines. It’s the way Expose works. The way Dashboard comes in. The way a window gets sucked into the dock. It’s iTunes’ visualizer. It’s the cube effect.

Aqua is transitions. Aqua is smooth transitions. Flow. That’s what Aqua means to me.

I hope you know this Aqua, because he’s a pretty fun guy to experience.

I want to bring this experience to the Web. Or rather, I want to inspire the people who know how it could happen to bring this experience to the Web.

Imagine you’re using the new Apple browser, iFlow. Its toolbar is white. Not off-white, but water-white. There is a slight current, like an aquarium. The toolbar has depth. Its browser buttons (the back, forward, home, etc.) are bubbles on a white, subtly liquidic background. Pressing one of them creates a smooth ripple across the surface of the toolbar. The address bar is like long, thin, anchored raft on the surface. It moves, but not enough to distract.

Now, the place where the web page comes up is normal. Macsurfer.com will still look like Macsurfer.com looks like in Safari. That part of it doesn’t have to change (which is another reason why its an evolution; no need to throw away what still works just to throw things away).

But we haven’t really done anything different yet. We’ve just made a really cool looking theme that would be difficult to replicate. It doesn’t really change the experience of the Web, just the experience of the browser.

What I’m talking about doesn’t change the computer aspects that we expect from the Web. We’ll still need help at certain points with the Web, we just don’t want to feel like something has to work for us to get that help.

This Aqua theme on the browser changes the way we experience the browser by not using a metaphor that comes from things that work. This theme makes it feel like the browser enjoys having its bubbles pressed. There’s no work being done. And no work is needed. We don’t have to think of tasks or goals. Instead, we can make it pleasurable. Don’t think goals.

Think desires.

Now that we can desire that pleasure with the browser, let’s increase our desire to seek pleasure with the Internet.

Imagine you click on a link. That’s the beginning moment of your experience with the Web. Reading a specific Web page is just your experience with that specific page.

But if my experience with the Web is not defined as my experience with the individual Web pages, then what am I talking about here?

Let’s say we go to a party at one of our friends’ houses (I’m talking about you and I now). We walk in, we venture over to the same room, sit down, have a drink, etc. You start talking to one person, me to another. I get up to go into another room. Since we agreed earlier that you and I would always walk from room to room, you get up and together we walk through the doorway into the next room, where we split up again.

The rooms in this metaphor are the Web pages. Me clicking on a link is standing up and signaling to you that its time to go.

But as I said, I don’t want to control the Web, like the way I don’t want to control you. We agreed to this leaving thing together. So when you decide to leave the room, I have to end what I was doing and move with you. This is analogous to the way the Web sometimes take you from one page to another even though you didn’t click on anything. If I want to go back to the room you just pulled me out of, I’ve got to tell you about it; I’ve got to click the back button.

Anyway, the experience of this party for us is different. I have no idea what you’re doing when we’re not together. So when someone asked me if I enjoyed going to the party with you, I can only talk about this times when we were together, moving from one room to the next; my experience is based on how well we experienced the transitions together.

That’s how we’re talking about the Web here. As the transitions between the Web pages. Our experience with the Web is our experience as we transition between the pages. And, as we know, Aqua is all about transitions.

Now, imagine you’re using iFlow, you click on a link. From that moment until the moment you start interacting with with the new Web page, you’re having a pleasurable experience with the Web, Aqua style.

Try this visual metaphor. Remember in Finding Nemo when they’re in the gulfstream with the turtle dudes and they have to transition from the gulfstream to the open ocean? And they shoot through that long winding tunnel of water? That’s something like what I’m talking about.

Of course, it should be a bit more relaxed. Imagine when you click on a link, the iFlow smoothly zooms in to that link, and then the whole browser screen starts to swirl a little bit, as if you’re about to be sucked into a cyclone. And then, you are. You are sucked into the cyclone. And there’s an experience of swirling around through water tunnels. It’s during this point when the browser is downloading all the data to build the next page. Depending on the speed of your connection, this whole zooming through tunnels experience could only last a few moments or it could last a minute or so. But during that time, you don’t feel like your waiting for something to happen. Instead, you’re experiencing what it’s like to ride the Web.

That image is a screenshot from my screensaver, Plasma Tunnel. It’s a decent representation of what I’m talking about.

Imagine seeing something like that between your page views. That’s what it’s like to use the Apple iFlow.