This began as a short post, that got longer, and added to, and added to some more, before becoming a seemingly messy collection of disparate opinions. There’s a thread running through it though, so hang in there! Pretend it’s like one of Matt Webbs fascinating “Filtered for…” posts. This one, filtered for ease, cognition, friction, and empathy.

It’s not that difficult…

I’ve lots of thoughts around this piece, from the thoughtful Manuel Moreale. It slightly triggers my panic about generational amnesia, but this point struck me as particularly sharp:

The vast majority of people on social media won’t move to blogging because what they get out of social media is not the same thing you get out of blogging. I think it’s a false equivalence.

Sadly, I think he’s right. As much as my hope for the IndieWeb grows, and while I keep fantasising about blogging products to rival certain social media platforms… blogging and social media are simply not the same thing.

I wonder if we can even claim the latter evolved from the former? It’s tempting to think so, but perhaps it’s more a case of convergent evolution. Strategies that emerged independently within the (un)natural environment of the web, rather than in succession.

Either way, the increasing dominance of what social media offers over blogging feels more and more unbeatable. And in my mind, that’s almost entirely due to the persistence of what I believe are very well meaning, yet sadly naive beliefs such as this…

Creating an account on bearblog.dev is not harder than signing up on Instagram and buying a domain name isn’t rocket science.

I don’t mean this in a rude or condescending way. If anything, it’s the opposite. IndieWeb and blog writing types (in my experience) are lovely, engaged, dedicated, experimental, and optimistic people. But, they tend to be so smart and capable that their curse of knowledge is just too strong. Their ability to conceive what the majority of people class as ‘not hard’ or ‘rocket science’ is simply very far off.

Technically it’s not that difficult…

This post by Jeremy Keith, echoing the disbelief of John Gruber, triggered similar feelings. They both argue – and I have no doubt whatsoever they’re technically right – that an electric company’s website should be built as well as its app. Gurber writes…

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

And Jeremy adds (I think, with the word ‘technical’ offering the same emphasis as my italics above)…

There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.

They’re both partly right, and Jeremy gets closest to being rightest, but I think they’re ignoring an important detail that’s the ultimate cause of their ire: That for most people, ‘app thinking’ is just easier than ‘web thinking’.

The cognitive path of ‘Service need > Open app’, is shorter and easier. And today, as proven by most web vs. app experiences, it’s become the most common route to meeting user needs.

‘Service need > Open browser > Search for website > Select appropriate website link (rather than a sales site or advert for a competitor) > Navigate website > And so on…’ is awkward as hell.

Yes, technically a website could be designed well and brilliantly built, but getting to it involves what today is a marginally more uncomfortable cognitive path.

And yes, the culture of modern front-end web development could align with great effort to resolve a ton of the issues that create such nasty user experience, but in the meantime the cognitive path of ‘Got need > Go to app’ is becoming ever more culturally engrained.

I wish there was an app…

One of my pre-teen sons recently said words to the effect of…

I wish there was an app that could tell me interesting things about each day, like, if it’s a special day here, or somewhere else in the world, or what happened on that day in history.

Firstly, that’s a calendar. Secondly, he’s essentially having the idea of the world wide web, framed inside the container that his generation knows best: The app. Not the browser.

In his digital experience: Apps do things. Each one has a speciality. So if you need a thing, or think of a thing, you need an app.

Note, a very relevant piece of detail to this story, is that due to my concerns for the digital safety of my children, all the devices they have access to are quite heavily locked down with parental settings. Including near fully restricted access to the web: The environment I feel least able to protect them within while unsupervised.

It’s easy

As I said at the top, the point I was working toward in this post is a little messy. I start with what I felt is the slightly naive view of a very capable and well-meaning person.

That made me think of two more – far more smarter than me – people, and what seemed like their blinkered avoidance of some fundamental user experiences and needs. Factors that are far more influential on user behaviour, than any issue relating to technical implementation or industry culture.

And that reminded me of my son, and hearing him basically come up with the idea of the world wide web, through the lens of an app!

While each of these references exists within their own context, and with a lot more nuance than I touch on here, for me, they all boil down to the same subject: Ease, and the users desire not to think. Or to put that another way: The user need not to think.

It’s obvious

By no means is this a new angle. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug came out in 2000 (with revisions in 2005 and 2013). And The Shallows by Nicholas Carr in 2010, was an extension of his 2008 article titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? And the theme of ease runs through the hallowed GDS Design Principles. 1, 4 and 6 in particular.

Easy always wins. We know all this. That we design to make things things easier, to meet user needs, and to reduce cognitive friction is fundamental – in all areas of design. Doubly so in digital design. Triply so in user centred design. It’s obvious!

But, is it really?

Do we actually realise this obvious fact? Do we respect it?

So, why is easy so difficult?

I wrote last year that user experience is a joke (in longer from on here), and while it might seem like a tongue-in-cheek hot-take, or irreverent piece of clickbait, I genuinely meant that I find it embarrassing. More than two decades of digital platforms being the dominate interface of the world, and yet most interactions feel like bug riddled first try prototypes. Users are frustrated, UX is a joke, and when it’s done well it’s always a benefit for a business. So what the hell is going on?

I’ve continued to poke at the reasons why, and have added to my list of theories, causes, correlations, and hypothetical solutions. A lot of these I’m working on in other formats right now, but for the most part, I believe it’s down to the simple issue of ease. And more particularly, our dysfunctional relationship with addressing it:

1. The fact we have such differing opinions about how easy things should, or even could be.
2. And differing definitions of what easy even means.
3. But ultimately, there seems to be a collective reluctance to consider the topic with collective empathy.

Collective empathy in pursuit of ease

I use the term collective empathy (and collective reluctance) to stress that tackling bad user experience needs more than a siloed team of user centred researchers and designers. It means a shift from empathy featuring only as a nice and benevolent idea in design sprints, toward empathy and ease becoming organisational objectives (or principles, if you prefer that word, with which I have a separate beef).

There’s a lot more I want to write on this. To share my theories of empathy and ease, and expand my ideas for tackling the latent collective reluctance, but this post has gotten a bit too big to carry on.

To close for now, I want to reiterate my respect for Manuel, Jeremy and John, and my son! I believe these are good people with the best of intentions for user needs and accessibility. In fact, Jeremy in particular with – I would argue – Clearleft being one of the most important and influential digital agencies of the past 20 years.

But clearly, in all that time, and despite all their good work and similar efforts from loads of other people, we’re still collectively missing something. A behaviour to ensure that ease and good UX are the norm, rather than the exception.