Interactions with Interfaces: Season 1

Learning about how our lives are impacted by the interfaces we interact with, one essay at a time.

In 2011, software was eating the world. In 2021, it has already eaten the world. 

When I was a kid, I was attached to my blue backpack and my green metal pencil case with Buttercup, the green Powerpuff girl, on it. I would wake up every morning, make sure the pencil case was there in my backpack, zip my backpack close and leave for school. Having these with me made me feel secure and confident - come what may I had the right toolset. I saw my parents attached to their own versions of routine and comfort, my mom to her wristwatch, my dad to his wallet and keys. We all had things that made us feel secure and supported. Now, more than a decade later, we all still do; the only way the attachments of today differ is that they are no longer only material. It is not only my desk that makes me feel comfortable and settled in and ready to take on the world, it is also the familiar UI of the list of never-ending emails that I see on my phone screen every morning. The updating timelines of Instagram and Twitter create a semblance of people walking by on the street, putting me in the groove and reminding me to get going like everybody else. These apps are our homes too now. They remind us that everything in the world is going fine.

If we ask what is special about the apps today, we know that it isn’t the apps themselves. Apps and software are no longer a wonder like they were 10 years ago. Pointing out the fact that they’re everywhere is like saying air surrounds us - it is too obvious and banal and it turns people off. You can get apps on your phone, you can get apps on your watch and you can even get apps on your ring.  

Today, the defining factor is not the abundance of apps, rather it is the chain of services formed by these individual applications interacting with each other that allow us to seamlessly traverse from one activity to the other.  For example, I can write in a document, share it widely, and collect the feedback in the same document -all by clicking only a few buttons among two or three apps. Secondly, the defining factor is also how these apps allow us to condense multiple activities into one single chain consisting of lesser steps. Consider cost-sharing - While shopping, I can pay with a click - go to another app to share the cost - which my friend can again pay in one click - the amount is reflected in my app and I can send it to my bank account in one last click. All this in under two minutes. 

While the payment gateway on the shopping website and cost splitting service are not interlinked on their own, it is the sequence in which they are used that creates a low effort pipeline of actions helping us achieve the same thing with lesser friction. This is seamlessness. Instead of me telling my friend the amount, my friend making a transaction, paying me the amount in cash, and me depositing the cash to my bank, it is now a simple 2-minute pipeline where all these steps are hidden under a black box of buttons. We don’t appreciate this kind of seamlessness enough, because the good pipelines that exist (like the payment example above) are so good that they are barely noticeable and because the new ones that we try to create on our own with new apps are not as straightforward - more often than not, they are glitchy.

I recently got a referral link for a financial Robo advisor. I was supposed to link my bank account to it. I tried to follow the buttons: clicked I agree - faceID - autofill - clicked I agree - bank’s website - give permission to share information. When I was expecting it to come back to the app and finally start using it, it instead took me to the app’s landing page on the internet and left me there. It didn’t bring me back to the product. It felt like being abandoned at sea. I made my way back to the app only to find out that my bank account wasn’t linked. What a waste of time. I give it to my friend, he shows me the form to manually enter the details. I am almost offended that the app doesn’t autofill or auto-link. How rude, I thought.

If that is not acceptable, then what do we want software to do for us? 

I love ease and comfort. Like all good things, it is their absence that we notice, rather than their presence. This absence is more noticeable than presence maxim holds true for our experiences using these apps too, but with apps, discomfort is less tolerable, probably because you expect it to be smooth. It is more annoying to keep on failing a captcha (of course I’m not a robot ugh) than trying to explain the same thing to someone twice. We expect more from our apps. I want the apps to know what to do, I don’t want to have to fill forms. I am a proponent of having a personalized ecosystem, although without exploitation. I imagine myself swooning from one app to another. Even on different devices, each application knows what is right for me and what I need without me telling them. Software as a personal assistant, but for everything from talking about my day to getting my groceries, to booking the kind of hotel I would like, to helping me do my job - everything. While we are getting there, our lives will first be made easier thanks to various existing infrastructures interlinked that will allow the logistics of our lives to seem seamless. These days, if you use the apps correctly, you can almost create an illusion of it but we are far from the software being more than just tools.

And what does this ease mean for us?

We’ve all heard that “in every loss lies a gain”. But in the case of technology, sometimes in a gain lies a loss. Despite the glitches and the lack of a perfect all-knowing app ecosystem, I can bank from my phone, get my groceries from my phone, and finalize all travel plans from my phone. Things are indeed quite simple to do. This simplicity however also creates a dearth of some experiences. Given how everything I’ve done is dominated by a predictable UI, I perhaps never built a very strong muscle for asking and navigating. On top of that, I also have a dislike for it. I don’t like going to the bank, it has too many steps - find where you’re supposed to put your name, tell the person what you’re here for, give them the details and documents, wait, finish your task and leave. Too many steps. Compare this with our parents, who probably do not enjoy relying on apps for daily life and definitely do not rely on navigation services either. They don’t expect ease from the apps the same way we do; if an app meets them more than halfway there, they consider their effort to be a part of the process.  We, on the other hand, scoff at the extra effort. Our parents don't mind asking questions and figuring it out - something that we learn how to do by listening to podcasts, bookmarking Twitter threads about it, and forcing ourselves to practice it.

Each change in our tools alters what takes up space in our minds, it alters what skill we build and causes us to leave some skills behind. As the pipeline of apps we use needs less and less intervention, it also leaves out some execution on our part. Today we are uniquely positioned to see both sides of the line. One side, looking forward - is the side where our lives are massively empowered by technology, and on the other side, we reflect on the lifestyles we will leave behind due to the empowerment. With these shifts in how we do things, come shifts in how we think and what we think about. There is no doubt that we are getting more than we are leaving behind. As we go through it, it fascinates me to see what has changed, and it is even cooler to see what aspects of life remained the same after the technological change. As we do that, this is also a good opportunity to ask ourselves about what we want from our apps and the emerging ecosystems as we make them indispensable to our day-to-day lives.

That is why I bring to you this newsletter centered around the theme of observation, reflection, and the future of software. We are going to talk about how technological infrastructure affects our everyday lives - from the most micro behavioral changes like exercising the muscle of asking questions, to macro shifts like changing currencies. We will reflect on these changes, how they add value and what they take away from us in the process of doing so, and finally, we will aspire to elevate the quality of our lives using software - all of this through the lens of stories, essays, and case studies. 

This is interactions with interfaces - Learning about how our lives are impacted by the interfaces we interact with, one essay at a time. 

Until Issue 1,

Ketakee