I promise I’m not going to blog about UX all the time.
The other day I was at the Hilton listening to a keynote speech given by Chamath Palihapitiya. He was one of the founding partners in Facebook (now VP of marketing), as well as other Internet phenomena like ICQ, and Winamp. By the way he started a career in derivatives trading!!! Before ever going Internet technology pioneer. He had some very interesting, wise, and inspirational things to say. But those are no fun to comment on, I want to disagree with him on something. He showed us a curve, it looked like a half of one of these. It was a plot of the adoption of facebook and he said that he sees no sign of it stopping – ever. I don’t have an exact quote, however he inferred that you could extrapolate the Facebook future usage from this chart (without ever having a problem) using a second order polynomial. I want to make it clear he made no reference to polynomials, I’m using this as a metaphor for his subtle inferrences. This is where I was like, “All trends end”. And you know why this trend is going to end is because the facebook UI is becoming cluttered while one by one I’m hearing people realize: “facebook is a waste of time” or “facebook it’s starting to feel creepy”. The thing is, social networking won’t end, it’s here to stay. It’s a great tool. However the technology will evolve and new players will enter. I bet nobody saw the end of ICQ coming (at least in Ontario) however their UI was simple and effective at first, then it got cluttered with features – people moved to MSN (at least in Ontario). Rinse and repeat, MSN is getting cluttered as people move to g-talk. I wonder if google will screw up a good thing with too many extra features – oh wait, didn’t they just “improve” the emoticons. I hear the sound of water whirling around and down – that’s g-talk’s eventual demise coming in 5 or 6 years. Of course this depends on the ramp up of complete adoption. Then again maybe google will continue to innovate as well as keep all their UI’s simple.
Lots of people think up stuff and name a “Law” after themselves. Look at Fitt. One day, when I have more free time, I’m going to try to create The McLarty’s Law of UI evolution: user interfaces are born simple, and die complicated. Those words are mine. Copywrite that, right now, where is my copywriting machine.