In roughly three weeks, the Twitter game Spymaster went from an idea in my head to the second-most trending topic on Twitter. Along the way, we’ve exposed a lot of weaknesses in Twitter’s platform. While Twitter has some flaws in their current user experience, I can’t fix them. What I can do is optimise for my own users.
After a two-month hiatus — the first in hyalineskies history — I’ve moved across the United States, took a job as a designer at Facebook, and redesigned hyalineskies to its eighth version. In the process, I’ve learned a lot of things about development, city life and culture. I’ve also found responsibility that I’ve never had before.
We constantly look toward our books of things of what not to do when designing interactions with people; we incessantly read how to make our users more passionate and addicted to our material. In the end, what we as humans really seem to care about isn’t how close we adhere to theory and standards: instead, we just care about emotion.
In the same week, negative publicity and personal issues have slammed the blogs of prominent A- and B-listers such as Kathy Sierra, Chris Locke, Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke. What many of those in the blogosphere don’t seem to realise is that we are psychologically building ourselves into the same realm as that of real celebrities, and there are many more people following your every move than you would think.
Things haven’t changed in the mainstream; well, at least since 1967. Teenagers, trendwhores, and other conspicuous consumers elevate the overall user experience of an item to iconic status, entirely against the expectations of its original designers, and in doing so can create what are essentially viral products. There is a way to topple the tyrant, however, and it’s using the method you’d least expect.
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