Letter writing and real-world gifting can be surprisingly rewarding, due in part to the thoughtful, tangible effort they require. The task presents a challenge, albeit a simple one, and meeting that challenge feels instinctively good. We find that perfect something or pen that perfect line for a particular someone, and then push it out into the world and wait. Love, work, play, or anything in between, the process is similar when done well. And the reward is amplified, sometimes immeasurably, when we get the response we were hoping for. Call it skin in the game, call it a good day’s work, call it the thrill of the hunt; we’re human and most of us don’t want life to be served up on a platter. We like working for it.
Even a phone conversation, in comparison to many forms of digital communication (anything driven by text on screen), is more challenging in the sense that it requires an active presence of mind, an energy, that can’t be faked as it can while protected by the familiar cloak of the chat window, the mail app, the social utility or SMS.
When you write a letter, even after the physical act of putting pen to paper which arguably produces more valuable writing as a sheer response to the effort involved, you still have to find an envelope, address it, find a stamp, lick it, find a mailbox, and stuff it. In digital that entire stream of actions is consolidated to a few keystrokes (entering enough of the recipient’s name for auto-complete to do its job) and a single click (send).
Perhaps we need to find the digital equivalent of licking that stamp. We (being the designers of new communication technologies) need to make things just hard enough that they make people feel good, and not a bit harder. The things that should be efficient – delivery, discovery, filtering and organization – should stay efficient. The things that should feel kind of hard – preparation, creation, composition, ideation and perhaps even some aspects of delivery and discovery – should be a little harder.
One might argue that this list of ‘things that should feel kind of hard’ is still hard, and in many ways I agree. We don’t have robots doing the writing for us yet, although remote digital assistants, spell checkers and pre-defined templates in word processing software have come close. That said, I believe our current tools and platforms for digital communication celebrate efficiency above substance, immediacy above timeliness, and laziness above doing things worth a damn.
In order to get at the heart of this, we have to design for intended (and hopefully better) behavior. This goes way beyond textured backgrounds and deliberately tactile treatments of UI elements, although there’s nothing wrong with those things when done right. We should look at how we actually interact with technology and try to find a fresh upside. What might happen when we throw out our standing assumptions on how to behave within a given piece of software?
For example, how would you design an email application built around the needs of a much smaller network, or simply a lower volume of correspondence? Not everyone on the planet needs to process hundreds of emails per day. In fact, I’m going to step away from my nerdcore existence and say that most don’t, although the vast majority of folks designing the software probably do. And so the physical equivalent of today’s inbox is nothing short of a small-town post office bustling away (and bursting) within our homes and offices. Maybe we write and send so many emails, often carelessly, because the software is practically begging us to do just that.
[…] the physical equivalent of today’s inbox is nothing short of a small-town post office bustling away (and bursting) within our homes and offices.
How might the mail application change when the focus is on composing and digesting 5, 10 or 20 pieces of correspondence per day (and doing it with style)? Is the list-format inbox still the primary view, or is there value in surfacing and prioritizing other tools or views to support the process of crafting and sending a message? How about a grid of faces, allowing me to prioritize my correspondence based on my relationships? Or a system that organizes mail by corresponding due dates while keeping other messages out of view until I actually need to process them. Google recently, fairly infamously at this point, set out to fix email with Wave, but in most ways they accepted the problems of email and attempted to engineer a better set of solutions to those problems. What if we start by throwing out the problems altogether?
These are just a few examples around the framework of email. I won’t get started on digital gifting, social messaging, or the countless other cases of ‘made-for-scale’ design and technology. My point is simply that there must be better ways for people to communicate electronically, and designers have a responsibility to evolve behavior, not just accommodate the norm in slightly snazzier ways. The solutions may even result in some modes of behavior that are just a little bit harder, in that “sweet, I just rocked that” kind of way.
If you’re as tired of your digital communication tools as I am, try this; pick three of the people you need to email today and write them a hand-written note or letter instead. You might be surprised by how much it changes the spirit and quality of even the simplest, most mundane correspondence. You also might be surprised by how crappy your handwriting looks.
Don’t forget the stamp.
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Nathan Heleine is the Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Crush + Lovely. If so inclined, follow his updates on Twitter.
Image: Paul Octavious
© 2011 Crush + Lovely 
Made for Humans
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