Euphemisms
Posted September 20, 2011 @ 11:07 am
“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation.” - George Carlin
The argument about which platform to design for first—mobile or desktop—is growing louder every day. And it’s been bothering me. Up until today, I couldn’t put my finger on why.
Mobile computing and desktop computing are nonsensical terms. What we’re seeing is the separation of business computing from personal computing—truly personal computing—which up until the last three or four years had been indistinguishable because of hardware.
In 2007, your laptop at home could have been your laptop at work and vice versa. Both used the same hardware and software to perform very different tasks. In 2011, if you have an iOS device, chances are good that the computer you check email with at work looks nothing like the computer you browse the web with at home.
Mobile applications and mobile operating systems are successful because they’re simple. But I believe the simplicity of mobile software is coincidental. People have always wanted the level of simplicity that modern mobile apps afford. However, they couldn’t demand it from the hardware that was available. When given few constraints, developers will cram things into every available pixel.
But that’s just it—smart phones enforce simplicity via hardware constraints. And now that consumers have simpler software, they want it everywhere. That’s why apps are starting to transition back to the Mac from the iPhone and iPad, and it’s why Apple brought things that made iOS easier to use back to the desktop with OS X Lion. It’s happening everywhere. The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific is essentially the same app on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Elements of successful, simple design are being added to OmniFocus on the Mac because they worked so well on the iPad.
This explains why the iPad has been successful, too. Like the iPhone, it’s a hardware platform that enforces the simplicity that users crave.
I think it’s time we stop calling iOS and Android and WebOS “mobile platforms.” Yes, you can carry them around with you, which makes them inherently mobile. But that’s tantamount to calling your wallet a mobile money container. Phones. Tablets. Slates. There’s a simpler term available to us that gets to the heart of what we’re designing for: personal computers.
And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the euphemisms we’ve adopted. We shouldn’t argue mobile .vs non-mobile as a starting point for design. The crux of that argument is simple vs. complicated. That’s the discussion we should be having, and it will always come down to this: distill your application down to its primary functions, and make those functions as fast and easy to use as you possibly can. Regardless of platform. Regardless of the size of the device. Regardless of OS.
Simple vs. complicated is a platform-agnostic discussion, and it should take place whenever a design decision is being made. People avoid it because it’s a thistle, a tough discussion that often leads to hard questions and passionate, heated arguments. But it has to happen.
We need to remember that, at the end of the day, after we’ve waded through the jargon and the weasel-words and the conflict-avoidance, no matter what device we’re designing for, the goal should always be simple software.
