Storytelling in Design

Chapter 7. Defining the Setting and Context of Your Product

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Defining the Setting and Context of Your Product

Once Doesn’t Mean Always

In 2014 I went to the Swedish Embassy in London to vote in the election back home. It was one of those moments where I wanted to share my check-in with the world—or in this case, the Twittersphere. I opened up Foursquare, as it was still called back then, added a comment, and tapped the Twitter icon on the check-in screen and checked in.

A few days later, I was on my way to Berlin to speak at a conference and, as usual, I checked in to Heathrow T5 on Foursquare. We boarded the plane, and as I scrolled through my Twitter feed, I saw that Foursquare had shared my check-in on Twitter. I quickly deleted the tweet and opened up Foursquare to see what had happened. It turned out that since that time at the Swedish Embassy, where I’d chosen to share my check-in, sharing check-ins was now turned on by default.

It may seem like a small and silly thing, but these little things really make a difference. As the world we live in, and design for, becomes ever more filled with noise, it’s our responsibility as designers to make sure that we don’t add to it unnecessarily but instead help users do what they want and not make assumptions or decide for them. The right and nice way for the Foursquare app to have behaved in this instance would have been to look at my past behavior in the app and use a simple algorithm to decide how to handle the check-in scenario. ...