Surreal Notions

This is not a webpage.

Perhaps not as clever following René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, yet still valid (I would have said that back in 1928, except I wasn’t invited to the French exhibition and webpages weren’t in common use yet… and my parents hadn’t been born).  Consider René’s point for a moment.  The image of a pipe cannot be smoked; therefore, it is not a pipe.  Surrealism has always fascinated me as a topic of philosophical discussion (which, I confess, might have been encouraged by my favorite college pastime – screwing with inebriated philosophy majors).  Regardless, the topic seems to have some weight in the world of user experience design (UXD).  But first, allow me to expand on my initial observation.

The Treachery of Images - 1928-1929

How do you define a webpage?  Is it the rendered output of the browser?  The content contained on the page?  The underlying code such as HTML, CSS, javascript, Flash and such?  The underlying ones and zeros representing ASCII and various compressed media files that store and transfer that code?  Is it the local copy stored temporarily for the browser?  The copy on my server (and if so, which one)?

As you can see, the whole concept of what we call a “webpage” gets pretty convoluted when you try to nail it down.  We all (or at least I hope all of you) understand implicitly what a webpage is.  But the definition seems to be a bit elusive.  Now, I’m pretty confident several of those proposed definitions could suffice, but none of them would really be complete.  That’s why, no matter how you define it, I can refute your definition and say “this is not a webpage.”

What’s the point of all this babbling about semantics?  How does it relate to something real (as opposed to surreal)?  I’m getting to that.  Don’t worry, you’re not the first person to suggest I over think things occasionally, so bear with me.

The activity of thinking this through forces you (or at least me) to think of things from a mindset that I wouldn’t normally consider.  As a practitioner of UXD, I consider a website the culmination of technologies and content delivered to your browser when a super special URI is accessed.  As an entrepreneur, a website is little more than one delivery vehicle for a potentially valuable solution to some problem a given group of people have.  As a businessman, a website is a potential asset created and maintained by the firm to increase revenue, decrease costs or maintain existing clients (assuming new clients will increase revenue).

Here’s the problem – These are all valid, yet juxtaposed, concepts.  Each of those definitions are valid for a website, but reconciling them is nearly impossible.  This is what UX designers deal with on a regular basis (perhaps it’s just me, but I’ll assume that at least some designers are like me).  The act of design is frequently an attempt to reconcile inherently incongruous juxtapositions (i.e., surreal).

Good design sometimes requires us to look past temporarily incongruous juxtapositions, so long as they cancel out in the end.

Frequently, to design a good experience, the designer must put himself or herself into a mental position that hasn’t been (or can’t ever be) directly experienced.  For instance, when I was working on Plum Keeper, I had to consider the experience from the primary user group’s perspective, which is pretty typical.  Unfortunately for me, the primary user group are mothers of small children with moderate computer skills. Being a single male (yes women of the Interweb I’m a single geek, how original) with no children (last I checked), the whole young mother thing is a bit unlikely to ever happen and certainly hasn’t occurred yet.  Furthermore, I’m hardly a computer guru, but I’ve been around the block a few times (I started on a C64 and have been online since the early 90s… good ol’ BBS’s).  I know plenty of mothers who I interviewed for the project, but as much as I sympathize with their situations I can never truly empathize.  This is where understanding (or at least pretending to understand) surrealism can help in reality.  The same skills used to digest those incongruous juxtapositions of surrealism will help feel out alternative design possibilities (e.g., me mothering a couple young kids).  I think the design Kyrie Robinson (who has the unfair advantage of being a mother of young children) and I came up with will work out pretty well, but only time will tell.

It reminds me of electrical engineering.  For those of you that haven’t studied the topic, it can get a bit confused.  Imaginary numbers supposedly simplify the algebra (if you insist on calling that mess simplified), but they have to cancel out in the end (seeing as we live in the non-imaginary world).  Now, when dealing with trivial cases, this seems obvious and is pretty easy to do.  My class was a bit different.  Hard doesn’t begin to explain it, but I’ll tell the story of my migraines and C+ worthy 17% another day.

So here’s the grand wisdom (or at least a good idea) that I’ve garnered from surrealism, which I use in product design:  Good design sometimes requires us to look past temporarily incongruous juxtapositions, so long as they cancel out in the end.  Although I might not be able to empathize with a mother of young children, I can attempt to sympathize.  In doing so (if I do my job well), I create an experience that will effectively solve a problem for those mothers.  The imaginary number of my design efforts (me as a mother) cancels out (real mothers like it too).