Making the new feel familiar

Every time we invent new technology, memes carry over from the old way of working. The icon for saving your work in Microsoft Office is a floppy disk, despite falling out of use in the 1990s. The camera on an iPhone still makes a ‘click’ sound when taking a picture, despite there being no mechanical shutter. Electric cars still have prominent front grilles, despite there being no internal combustion engine to cool. The technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies despite no longer being necessary is ‘Skeuomorphism’. We spent a lot of time training our brain on what looks or feels right, and if a novel technology comes along that doesn’t resonate with that reality, it will struggle to get adoption. Initially even the inventors themselves can’t imagine how the world has just changed, and simply copy what they know across to the new medium. For example the first trains looked like several carriages slung together, until designers got a handle on what new designs were now possible.

Later, skeuomorphs are retained to educate users on what an object does based on its appearance. For example early cars were marketed as “horseless carriages”. The trash icon on computers is shaped as an actual trash can. The swipe function on the iPad echoes turning a page. Mapping past experience to new technology can speed up adoption of the unfamiliar. Raymond Loewy talked about the idea of MAYA: Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. You can’t launch something completely novel, it had to have a touch of familiarity to make it acceptable. Your positioning has to speak to the existing preferences, biases, and inertia present in the market. When the Smirnoff brand launched vodka in the U.S. in the 1930s, it was advertised as “white whiskey”. Whiskey is what Americans drank at the time, and unfamiliar with vodka. Positioning it as whiskey but with “no taste, no smell” appealed to some segment of the market, and sales picked up. Eventually it became a category of its own, but it would have been a mistake to run a modern day Smirnoff ad back then, before people had time to experience the product. The same approach worked for the introduction of sushi to America also: the California sushi roll – a more familiar mix of ingredients, including crab, avocado, cucumber – lowered the barrier to trying a more exotic style of food.

As our familiarity increases, Skeuomorphism gives way to flat design, de-cluttering old memes and fully utilising the new medium. Studies show that older generations prefer Skeuomorphic designs, but they provide no value to newer generations, unfamiliar with the original technology being emulated. For example professors are having to redesign their lectures as students who grew up with Google are unfamiliar with the concept of files and folders: they just keep all of their documents unorganized in Google Drive, and use the search bar to find anything they need. Which is of course how Google actually stores the data underlying the user interface: in Google Cloud “folders” are literally just prefixes in the file name, unrelated to hierarchy. There is danger in not accurately representing the underlying system, and creativity can be artificially limited by mimicking the past. Apple mostly abandoned Skeuomorphic design in iOS7, ripping out faux leather-stitching, bookshelves with wood veneers, and fake paper. However some analogies are too good to give up, as their meaning has transcended the original source for stylistic or cultural reasons. Ancient Greek stone temples kept features from their wooden forebears. North American pottery resembled the woven baskets that predated ceramics. Apple Watches still have analogy clock faces.

About the Book 📕

← Back to Essays 📝