Thinking about a really basic distinction between actions, that seems super relevant to product design. Do the actions in your app feel like: 1. TASKS: things to do, planned in advance 2. URGES: things I'm doing spontaneously Netflix shifted 1→2 with mail→streaming.
Tasks vs urges as a design distinction for apps
10 tweets · February 2021 · 28 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
I asked @BlackForestBoi in a convo right now, to illustrate this point: when someone sees a new highlight has shown up in Memex, does that feel more like: 1. a new homework assignment 🙄 2. a new episode of a favorite TV show? 👀 Huge difference in UX based on that sense.
The task/urge dichotomy is reified by school & work contexts, where what we're supposed to do is almost ALWAYS in conflict with what we feel drawn to do. But we later bring that dichotomy into contexts where nobody is imposing it. Can learn not to:
The holy grail is being able to organize your life so that you spontaneously… A) generate B) follow …urges that move towards things that are satisfying, meaningful, purposeful. Rather than having there be a constant fight. Thing to do? Do it right now!
To some extent this is entirely a mindset thing—open tabs often function for people as todos, even though at other moments the same app/system might function in a more urge-driven way. Twitter tabs from days ago are implicit todos.
The particular controls in a given app/system do affect this though. I'm sometimes most on top of twitter DMs because they have the least possible amount of snoozing or anything like that.
My recent ruminations on reinventing tabs altogether are part of the thinking that's going into this, plus a conversation today with @BlackForestBoi about designing annotations into his app @worldbrain.
I'm getting better and better at this mindset, not worrying about trying to keep track of everything. Ideally would have best of both worlds (~= well-organized browser history) but in the meantime sometimes it's good to just let go.
I have a handful of ideas for systems that will help with generating & following purposeful urges. Some I'll build into complice.co, some will undoubtedly emerge as Roam plugins sooner or later, yet others I may need to seduce people into building for me!
For @CompliceGoals in particular, I've started ideating around a Now Page, that's even further in this direction than the Today Page already is, focused on just dialoguing with whatever you want to do in a given moment and making it even more clear & more awesome.