Small Reflection on Human Experience (HX) Principles
The recent change on GitHub to turn each user's landing page into an aggregated feed of events across the entire platform has drawn criticism, and led me to investigate what it is I dislike about it so much.
The answer is that an event-oriented Human Interface (HI) is focused on reactive tasks. The HI is in charge of which events to feed the human, and the human's job is to react to each event by performing some task.
By contrast, investigative HI keeps the human in the driver seat. It offers a data space to explore, and may provide features for the human to create their own to-do lists.
Such a to-do list is not functionally different from an event feed in that it still offers tasks that the human should reactively perform. However, the curation process is entirely different — not only is it user driven, it is also highly selective. Users can furthermore switch between modifying this list and executing tasks as they see fit.
The upshot is that such a list ends up being less focused on reactive work, and more on planning one's tasks, which, again, is more of an investigative activity.
So I prefer HI that supports me in investigative work over HI that tries to impose reactive work on me. Fair enough!
But beyond this, I can't help but notice that social media are a mixture of both modes. Consuming social media is highly event driven, and reposting and liking are reactive tasks one engages on based on those events.
Even replying — whether it's in the form of a quote, or a comment — is largely reactive. Without the OP, there is nothing to do.
When I create new content, however, this is more investigative. It's not that every piece of content requires deep focus. But it is my internal stimulus that sets the task in motion, I search the HI for the appropriate elements that let me create, and I set out to create.
The prevalence of social media, and the related understanding that a fair few of our Human-Computer interactions are reactive, may make it seem as if an event driven HI is a good choice in general. We've certainly seen similar patterns in desktop and mobile operating system design, where more and more notifications clamour for our attention.
I think what this change on GH has done is illustrated to me that this is not merely a trend, something that's changed over time. But that this reflects a fundamental difference in how one approaches computing in general.
The question is: are computers tools that we use in investigative tasks? Or are computers entertainment devices that trigger reactive responses?
I know that dichotomy is false. The point isn't to be accurate here. It's to create polar opposites on a spectrum, on which we can now decide where computers should fall and why.
One thing I can say for certain for myself is that with the exception of calendar notifications, I mostly prefer not to be notified of anything at all. Calendars are an exception, because they're rarely only about me — I usually use calendars to notify me when other people want something that I'm also needed for.
Which means I very much prefer investigatively oriented HI.
And I'll leave it at that, because exploring this in more depth would turn this into something a little more than a “small reflection”.