The Sanctity of Space: Physical and Digital
Thinking about the spaces we're stuck in this year.
My sister and I lovingly refer to our childhood home as “the vortex.” It was clean but dysfunctional. The furniture didn’t really go together, there weren’t many photos or art on the walls, and the walk-in closet was the household junk drawer. To this day, that closet is where you go for cooking supplies, evening attire, or extra paper. You couldn’t always find the phone chargers, and sometimes things stayed broken for a while. It wasn’t a priority for our parents, who care more about home-cooked meals and making time for friends and family, than interior design and decor.
My childhood bedroom was and continues to be, a little dysfunctional
Since then, I’ve married someone who believes strongly that everything has its place and won’t let something stay broken for more than a day. At first, I was annoyed by his need for supreme organization and attention to detail. However, over time, I’ve noticed that this actually has a really positive impact on how I feel when I’m in our home. We also spend time designing and curating our house to reflect our personalities. Our home now is colorful and filled with plants and art. And when I need something, I know exactly where to find it. This creates a sense of peace and positive energy, whereas my childhood home sometimes left me frustrated and tired.
Our living room right now, complete with dog (Luna)
Our digital environments affect us greatly, as well. Any platform or website is a digital space if you spend enough time there. For example, products like Slack, Zoom, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Houseparty, Clubhouse, Icebreaker, etc. have all become “spaces” where people go to hang out and connect. The more time we spend in digital spaces, the more I’ve been thinking about how to create a digital space that is inviting, comfortable, and makes you want to stick around.
Here are a few ideas that stood out as important to me:
Get the basics right
Broken stuff causes stress. Imagine you’re in your kitchen and the sink is leaking - so you either always have a puddle on the floor or a rag to catch the draining water. What kind of experience does that create whenever you walk into the kitchen? Frustration and annoyance. Similarly, for software products, people expect things to work. Broken experiences erode trust between the product and the user, create frustration, and hinder the user from getting the full value. It’s a basic but critical concept to get right.
Issa vibe
I’ve been noticing more about how I feel when I walk into a room. In contrast to my childhood home, my current one features intentional interior design and decor. I’ve started being thoughtful about what’s on the walls, the light, and the color of the space and how that affects our mood. When digital products use smart color, design, and copy choices, it can change the emotions people feel when using that product. A product can go from boring and stale to warm and inviting.
The design of Slack vs. Hipchat is a great example of this: the two products fundamentally created team chat software. However, Slack differentiated themselves by pushing the boundaries on what the product looked, felt, and sounded like (source for the image below), in everything from the UI to the copy in the loading messages. Those decisions, coupled with some other smart ones, helped them blow past HipChat beyond repair.
Form follows function
I remember learning the concept of form follows function in a middle school science class and thinking that it made perfect sense. Interior designers think about the function of physical spaces when designing everything, from the lighting of the room to the furniture to what materials will be used.
Let’s think about how this manifests in digital products:
The function of Snapchat is to send fun pictures/videos to people. The product opens up on the camera - form is incredibly close to function.
Google.com gets 60 billion visits per month. How has the main page changed over the past 20 years? It hasn’t really. The most important thing on that page has stayed consistent and central: the search box.
When looking for bad examples of products where form did not follow function, someone shared this: “The interface of an incoming call on an iPhone when you’re already on another call! As a user, I’m probably already busy + multitasking if I’m on a call and then they hit me with these confusing buttons + choices. If you’re on a call, big red button in the center = end current call, but here it means, keep going on current call + end new incoming call.” 🤯
The people make the space what it is
You can take a great physical place and put a bunch of people you hate in it, or a shitty place and a bunch of people you love, and it will drastically change the experience. We’re seeing this more and more with the digital products that we use - the people in the space bring it to life and give it personality. What they are enabled to do in these spaces is a huge component of that, as well.
Stack Overflow is an example of a product where some of the people using the site created a terrible environment, ultimately repelling people from the product. Though I don’t use Discord myself, it seems they have truly created a space that lets people engage with each other in a low-key and fun way. How people engage in the space is both a product of what they can do with the tools they are given (i.e. downvote on Stack Overflow) and the vibe/culture of the digital space.
So why does this matter? Our environments set the tone for our relationships, mindset, and behaviors. For me, that has meant being more mindful in cultivating a physical space that enables me to be productive, happy, and feel relaxed. It became even more important this year. The same is true for digital spaces, which we also spend a lot of time in. As a product person, this has got me thinking about how we can create digital spaces that are truly worth spending time in.
The Sanctity of Space: Physical and Digital
Nicely written.
Love the analogy to your childhood home and current home.
Vibe I got was that one wasn't better than the other necessarily.
That both were/are "just right" for the time you lived/live there.
This got me thinking about the unattended broken things in my house ; the lack of art ; the optimization for form that has only me in mind.
Explains why I rarely invite friends over despite having many of them
Maybe this current physical state affects my decisions in designing digital products
Made me think of how offices and homes of product development people affect their design decisions
Perhaps this is another driver to keep in mind for why and how offices should be redesigned at each maturity milestone of a product (e.g. pre-market fit, post-market fir, IPO etc.)
With COVID it's now actually up to the individual and not leadership as office = home.
I've always thought of myself as someone who likes tall ceilings. I love the feeling of the extra space as if it's extra room to breathe. But I've repeatedly found myself living in places where I can touch the ceiling and it works out just fine. This makes more sense now from the perspective of "form follows function".
Lol about "the vortex".