Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War

This essay is based on my lecture given at Interface Critique, Berlin University of the Arts, November 7th 2014.

Thank you for hosting me. Today I’m talking as the Geocities Institute’s Head of Research, an advocate for computer users’ rights, and interface design teacher.

RUE

I’ve been making web pages since 1995, since 2000 I’m collecting old web pages, since 2004 I’m writing about native web culture (digital folklore) and the significance of personal home pages for the web’s growth, personal growth and development of HCI.

So I remember very well the moment when Tim O’Reilly promoted the term Web 2.0 and announced that the time of Rich User Experience has begun. This buzzword was based on Rich Internet Applications, coined by Macromedia,1 that literally meant their Flash product. O’Reilly’s RUE philosophy was also rather technical: The richness of user experiences would arise from of use of AJAX, Asynchronous Javascript and XML.

The web was supposed to become more dynamic, fast and “awesome,” because many processes that users would have to consciously trigger before, started to run in the background. You didn’t have to submit or click or even scroll anymore, new pages, search results and pictures would appear by themselves, fast and seamless. “Rich” meant “automagic” and … as if you would be using desktop software.

As Tim O’Reilly states in September 2005 in blogpost What is Web 2.0?:2 “We are entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.”3

But Web 2.0 was not only about a new way of scripting interactions. It was an opportunity to become a part of the internet also automagically. No need to learn HTML or register a domain or whatever, Web 2.0 provided pre-made channels for self expression and communication, hosting and sharing. No need anymore to be your own information architect or interface designer, looking for a way to deliver your message. In short: no need to make a web page.

Homepage, last modified 1999-07-15 17:43:15, from the Geocities Research Institute collection

The paradox for me at that time was that Rich User Experience was the name for a reality where user experiences were getting poorer and poorer. You wouldn’t have to think about web or web specific activities anymore.

Also, Web 2.0 was the culmination of approximately seven years of neglecting and denying the experience of web users—where experience is Erfahrung, rather than Erlebnis.4 So layouts, graphics, scripts, tools and solutions made by naïve users were neither seen as a heritage nor as valuable elements or structures for professional web productions.

That’s why designers of today are certain that responsive design was invented in 2010, mixing up the idea with coining the term; though it was there from at least 1994.

And it also explains why the book Designing for Emotion5 from the very sympathetic series “books apart” gives advises how to build a project “from human to human” without even mentioning that there is much experience of humans addressing humans on the web that is decades old.

“Guess what?! I got my own domain name!” announces the proud user who leaves Geocities for a better place. – “So if you came here through a link, please let that person know they need to change their link!”

“If you take the time to sign my guest book I will e-mail you in return.” writes another user in an attempt to get feedback. Well, this one might be more of an example for early gamification than emotional design, but this direct human to human communication–something current designers have the largest desire to create–is very strong.

Geocities Research Institute: What Did Peeman Pee On?, Installation, Württembergischer Kunstverein, 2014

A few days ago, my team at the Geocities Research Institute found 700 answers to the question “What did peeman pee on?” Peeman is an animated GIF created by an unknown author, widely used on “manly” neighborhoods of Geocities to manifest disgust or disagreement with some topic or entity, like a sports team, a band, a political party, etc., kind of a “dislike” button.

It isn’t a particularly sophisticated way to show emotions or manifest an attitude, but still so much more interesting and expressive than what is available now: First of all, because it is an expression of a dislike, when today there is only an opportunity to like. Second, the statement lays outside of any scale or dualism: the dislike is not the opposite of a like. Third: it is not a button or function, it works only in combination with another graphic or word. Such a graphic needed to be made or found and collected, then placed in the right context on the page—all done manually.

I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution.6

And I don’t agree that the web...