Directionless Design

Instructions for use are embedded within casual interaction.

It was 1995 and you had just received an oversized Casio keyboard to fiddle around with. You’re excited, anxious, and you just can’t wait to set it up and start playing. But before you can begin to produce some earache-inducing, cacophonous tunes, you must go through the painstaking process of reading that 300 page manual.

Instructions used to be a burdensome, linear process, replete with tedious setup tasks and cautionary warnings. But now, in an age where our gaze is focused on the glow of a backlit screen, we are more intuitively learning about the intricacies of the interfaces we must interact with on a daily basis. The packaging of hardware has evolved into a minimal display of style and prestige, while the aesthetic qualities, and obvious tutorial overlays of software have the directions built right in. The simplicity and usability of an interface are among the most important pieces of the success or failure of an application. In the absence of a guidebook, we must navigate the interactive spaces we occupy by means of understanding (and oftentimes guessing) the basic iconography of the world. From Otto Neurath’s simplified summation of complicated ideas in the beauty of iconography, to the variable menus of a mobile application, we must rely on our natural sensibilities in order to master a modern toolset. 

An isotype by Otto Neurath. Image via Wikipedia.