What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.
Young and Brilliant: Wireframes for Thinking
“wireframes” or “sketches” (the semantics aren’t important here) are really like writing out long division. If you’re trying to think seriously about a software product, if you aren’t sketching things out, then you aren’t really thinking about it. Yes, some details are inane (“Where should I put the login button?”) but many more are the details that make up the service: Tumblr linking to its six basic post types wasn’t a detail, it markedly effected the way the service felt and was used. And these are the little details that we start to see once we can start externalizing bits of our short-term memory to paper.
As an even more general point, I’d say that confidence and fluency in sketching and diagraming is one of those things that can make us exponentially better thinkers.
I love this and agree 100%. Sometimes I use paper and other times I use software, but if you’re not writing it out in some way, you’re not thinking about it.
I think the web is heading towards an age of anthologies, where users gain new ways to select, sequence, and publish the content they come in contact with online. Some of these will be automated like Flipboard or Facebook’s timeline, but I’m more interested in the design opportunities of the manual tools that require our attention to pass over what we’ve reaped from the web. These anthologies are more than a flat stream or cursory pass over an exhaust of data. They are experiences and content chosen by the user to be shared in a certain sequence for a certain effect. The arrangements have edges, and fly against the nature of the web, simply in that one may “finish.”