Design Blunders — Dancing dots, and thoughtless copying.
I’m not sure if you have ever noticed, but most chat apps nowadays have dancing dots in them.
So what about them, and why are they bad?
Well first of all they are bad because they are soo good. They are good at doing the job they were created to do, which just so happens to have a bad outcome for us as users.
But wait a minute, what dots am I talking about, and what are they good at?
I think this is best illustrated by an example taken from my own life:
I walked up to a colleague a few weeks ago and noticed her sitting still, just staring at her screen. I mean dead still, no typing, no apparent mental activity going on, just looking at the screen, as if she had been bewitched.
So I, as any reasonable co-worker would, asked her if she just had a stroke.
Ok, no, I didn’t. Even if it sure seemed like it.
In reality, I likely said something a bit more accepted in an office setting such as — Hey, what’s up?
She responded that she was transfixed by three little dots dancing on the screen, and that she had been so for the last five minutes.
So I, as any reasonable co-worker would, sat down on the chair next to her, and we spent the following five minutes staring, in silence, at these same dots who continued performing their hypnotical movements.
So If you have not figured it out yet, the dots I’m talking about are the somewhat newly invented visual indicators that someone is typing to you. And in this specific case, I knew that she had just written an important question to another colleague, and that’s what I came over to discuss.
To convey why I dislike these dots, I think we first take a step back and think about design in general.
Wikipedia states that:
”A design is expected to have a purpose within a certain context, usually having to satisfy certain goals and constraints and to take into account aesthetic, functional, economic, environmental, or socio-political considerations.”
That’s all well and good, I kind of like this definition so I will now go on to make use of it to illustrate my point.
In this very example, I was struck by what the team that implemented these dots into Microsoft Teams, or Slack for that matter, were thinking — or rather and put a bit more bluntly, if they were even thinking at all.
Because sure, having worked at a large tech company myself, I can see how this design is ”suitable” for say a social media app such as Instagram, WhatsApp or Snapchat. Because as depressing as it might sound, at the end of the day, these apps are optimized for you to spend the most amount of time on them.
But for Slack and Teams? I mean why did they do it? What on earth were the decision makers here expecting these to contribue? Because surely, the people working on these platforms can’t have time spent on said platform as their main metric?
… Or can they?
Because in this case, I think it is even more absurd that they would. Since while social media apps can still make the bad yet on the surface seemingly decent claim that ”Time spent on our app is time spent communicating with other people, which is social, albeit digitally based”.
But neither Teams nor Slack are branded as Social Medias? So they can’t hide beind this bad excuse? They are corporate communication platforms, and they should be optimized for that and that alone, at least one would think. In an ideal world, their success, and their updates would be measured on how much they increase productivity. Productivity of not just the average worker but also of the whole company or department that use these, by means of hopefully increasing the communicational efficiency and effectiveness, and can anyone make a case that these dots really contributing to this?
To answer that lets back up just a bit. What about the definition and expectations of a design:
”A design is expected to have a purpose within a certain context, usually having to satisfy certain goals and constraints and to take into account aesthetic, functional, economic, environmental, or socio-political considerations.”
Does these dots have a real purpose in the context of a corporate communications platform? Do they take into account the aestetic, functional, economical, environmental, or socio-political aspects?
I’d say that they almost do the opposite to some extent. They do not serve a purpose in this context, they are not especially aesthetic, they are not functional given the goals of the people using the platforms, and they sure as hell are not economical — I bet very few companies wish to pay for people looking at dancing dots!
I am certain that these dots in the first place were created to do just what they did to me and my collegue. That is to say, they were created to make you spend time looking at them, nothing more, nothing less. If this is not clear to you, taken to the extreme, if you were to pay attention every time someone started writing to you on any medium (email, similar platforms, sms, socials etc), I am sure that this, in and of itself, would be a half-time job for most of us, so no, it does not fill any real need, we do not need to know this!
Hence, while I would love for them to be removed from every platform, at least remove them from these. Because this example is just a really bad case of copying a design pattern from a different context just because it is popular without having thought for a second about the consequences of doing so to the product in which it was implemented.
