Left, right, top, and bottom…
Designers make decisions every day that dictate human behavior. The social media notification–in Instagram aesthetics the heart–is what keeps users opening the app more than a dozen times a day.
How many likes did we get on our last post? Any new followers? We crave the variable reward, chasing persistent novelty in the cocoon of candy-colored lights.
Site architecture, like a map, is a mere representation. It’s an illustrated abstraction of territory just as skeuomorphism makes an icon for trash look like a garbage can.
Design is everything. The user interface makes no distinction between a screen and reality–it just wants us to stick around and navigate. The distinction between what we see versus the actual pixels creates a fragmented perspective, with a deliberate me and a hooked me.