Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Beyond and Behind the Screen

In the preceding chapters, we explored the world of designing screen-based interfaces for the web, software, and mobile devices. These patterns and best practices cover the world of people-facing digital product design, characterized by screen-based experiences that people can click and tap. Behind the scenes, however, changes are happening in the complex systems that power these interfaces and experiences, and more and more these changes are manifesting themselves in the way users interact with the systems and the systems interact (or don’t need to interact) with the user.

The majority of systems that are visible to the user involve the user contributing information or transactions to a system, and an interface that shows the results to the user. The patterns these systems use vary according to the intended use of that system.

Social media–oriented experiences such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter follow similar patterns, because at their core, the things they need to do are very similar. At a very basic level, the interactions involve a user posting content to a system that other people can view and comment on. The owner of the content can edit the content, delete it, or modify who can view it. Other users can like or share the content with others, or even tell the system if the content is offensive or if they choose not to see it. In this way, although the system mediates and shows content based on a complex set of algorithms, from the ...