design saves lives (sometimes)
a story about friendship + commentary on the design of technology
the story
I sat in the corner of my office. It was 20:00 and I was the last one left. I had held it together all day, which was necessary because my team looked up to me. It wasn’t professional to cry in front of my team.
I heaved a sigh and looked around the dark conference room. My elbows propped me up against the big wooden table, my long, wavy black hair streaked with highlights fell in front of my face. “Alone at last,” I thought.
But I was wrong.
My phone started ringing and it was my friend across the pond. It must’ve been the early afternoon for her. She was probably on a walk. She would probably say, “I have 15 minutes to chat”.
I picked up and my voice broke over a simple “Hi”. Even though she couldn’t see my face, she saw everything there was to see.
“Why are you in the office this late?” She asked. I started to cry, and I could almost hear her sternness evaporate.
“What’s going on? Tell me everything you are feeling.”
It was a sunny afternoon and I needed to stretch my legs after sitting all morning in meeting after meeting. I set off on my route to go see the water, per usual, and maybe pick up groceries on the walk home. My phone was in my breast pocket, also per usual.
As I briskly passed our neighborhood car mechanic, I remembered to text my roommate if her car was out of the shop yet. I opened my iPhone to my iMessages. My pinned bubbles at the top glistened. Right under the bubble for my roommate was the bubble for a close friend across the pond. “She probably needs me to check in on her,” I thought, already waiting for her to pick up.
Design saves lives (sometimes)
The bubbles at the top of iMessage were a feature released in 2020 with iOS 14. You hard press on a text thread and “pin” it. Once a conversation is pinned to the top, it is more likely that you remember to continue that conversation.
Each of us is allowed nine bubbles. Maybe they could allow for two more rows of bubbles, but that would reduce the bottom half by two conversations. It’s not just the quick access to the conversations that makes messaging easier, it’s the fact that they are circles. Delicate and yearning to be tapped. Circles that remind us, conversations never really end. Even once the person is far, far away, they live inside us. We can dream up conversations we might have with them, whenever we choose.
Each bubble at the top contains within it a world of laughter and tears, implicit understandings and soft aggression. The bubbles contain requests, ideas, beliefs, questions, concerns, memories, plans, and risks. The texts back-and-forth can be wonderful, but do they suffice? Is texting someone the same as sending them a voice note? Is sending a voice note the same as talking on the phone? What do we gain when we communicate synchronously? And what do we gain when we communicate synchronously and in-person?
I’m not sure what makes people feel less lonely, but I think it has to do with feeling understood. And my sense is that each person is capable of feeling understood through various types of communication.
Every design decision has an intention, and often human behavior fits neatly into those original intentions, but the entropy of our lives and the unpredictability of human behavior never ceases to delight me. The original intention of the pinned bubbles at the top of iMessage were to help users organize conversations in a world where we are having constant, multi-threaded communication. But what the bubble design did not know was that the size of bubbles grow and shrink. During certain periods, certain conversations are more important than others, even among the pinned. And it’s not only a matter of so-called importance, but more a matter of what that conversation needs.
I’m not sure what makes people feel less lonely, but I think it has to do with feeling understood.
When I hard press the bubble, it would be interesting if I could indicate what I think that conversation needs from me. For example, “mark conversation as in need of watering”, “mark conversation as helping brainstorm”, or “mark conversation as plans in progress”. My approach to conversation in general is, I try to think, what does this conversation need from me versus, what do I have to say? It could be a fun experiment to design an iMessage interface using this paradigm. With AI listening to a conversation — and privacy considerations taken into accont — there is also room for the bubbles to automatically be resized based on frequency, cadence, and tone of the conversation.
So, does Design save lives? In some ways obvious and in more ways nonobvious, the design decisions of product designers have the power and the potential to tug on the invisible string that connects all of us — reminding each person how utterly precious they are, like glistening drops of dew on a spider web.