Kevin Hale, Cofounder of Infinity Box Inc, shares Five Interface Laws Every Software Designer Should Know. This is a fascinating left-brained look at user interfaces. Kevin goes on to discuss his company's strategy of attending and supporting Barcamps all over the country.
Links referenced in the show:
The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.
Transcription
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Kevin 00:00:24 Hi. My name’s Kevin Hale. I’m one of the cofounders of Infinity Box Inc. We’re the makers of Wufoo: an online form builder. I do all the interface design, most of the marketing, and some of the copyrighting on the Website in addition to all the sort of typical duties that a founder does. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about the presentation I did back at SuperConf in Miami. And it was on the five interface laws that every software designer should know. The presentation went over, sort of, mathematical representations of, like, the human-computer interface laws and they are as follows: Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, the Acott-Steering Law, Miller’s Law, and the Power Law of Practice.
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Ryan 00:01:12 Yeah. This presentation was great. I really enjoyed how you unashamedly took it very, very left-brain. In a way, I think oftentimes designers don’t, at least in the presentations I’ve been seeing. And in just a really smart crowd and a great lineup of presentations, I think, you know, one of the two designers being the only ones with calculus in their slide deck; pretty impressive.
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Kevin 00:01:34
I did my best because if you see the slides and stuff it’s not, like, straight-up formulas. Like, there’s lots of colors and there’s lots of, like, visual representations and graphs showing off the stuff and I put lots of labels all over the place. But the idea came from I did love physics mathematics from my computer science courses back in college. I’d always felt like things didn’t click to me, you know, especially in calculus until I took physics, where I saw the real-world application and start graphing out the stuff. And those sort of graphing out helped me understand the nuances of, sort of, the formula and understandings of it. And I feel like it gives me this different level understanding of how to design interfaces and I feel like if there’s a way that I could, sort of, translate that and get that across to other designers, it might have them sort of interested in the numbers too. Because I always feel like it helps me take things to another level.
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Ryan 00:02:26
Yeah. Well what was great about it too was you had the takeaways, which are I think largely conventional wisdom in the field, but instead of just saying, “Make something bigger because it’s easier to click for people,” you go into why and people can figure out certain contexts of how maybe it doesn’t always have to be bigger, right? Just to get all the way to the side, it doesn’t have to be super, super deep. Like, things like that.
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Kevin 00:02:48
Yeah. I mean, Fitts’ Law is a really interesting one and it’s also why for each of the laws I go into sort of the history behind it. So who was the experimenter, what is the exact experiment that they came up with, and why that, sort of, has shaped the law the way it is; especially the mathematical representation. And it allows you to see, sort of, the pitfalls of it and it allows you to see sort of, like, where it will apply really well or if it doesn’t. So in the case of Fitts’ Law there, you know, it’s a law that describes something in only, sort of, one dimension. And it’s depending on straight, direct lines. And so actually, if you, you know, change the shape of something, I mean the typical representation of Fitts’ Law is the bigger the object, the easier it is to point at. But it turns out that if you make it bigger in a way that is perpendicular to where your object is coming from (your pointer or cursor or finger, for instance), it actually doesn’t actually help in Fitts’ case. So there’s, like, sort of all these visuals that showcase that. But it makes it very, very interesting, especially for people who are designing interfaces where someone is always going to start from one point and then moving to another point in order to do something else.
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Ryan 00:03:49
It’s interesting when you think about it in the context of, like, a form submit button. Generally, they’re far wider than they are tall and, generally, you seem to be coming to them from above.
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Kevin 00:03:59
From above, right. And it would actually be better if you make them taller than it is wider. And that’s why I always, like, when we’re looking at shaping buttons on our end, we always try to make them just either rounder or square; that way they’re easily accessible from all angles. So we actually go into a little bit about, sort of, like, you know, the best distance that you could travel is zero distance. And so there’s, like, a little bit stuff in there and I’m hoping to enhance the presentation further on. But talking about pie menus, right? So it’s like, you know, the interface where you right-click and something comes up. It’s really great to be able to use, sort of, this pie interface, which hasn’t become popular and there’s been a couple of intefaces that’s been trying to, sort of, model this. But it hasn’t been in, sort of, popular operating systems. And what it shows is, like, it creates this crossing interface where all you do is, like, you start from your origin port or the center of the circle of a pie menu and you just, you know, go forward as fast as possible to one of the angles where the pie wedges out. You know, there’s all these interface that show how much faster it is for a user to be able to process options and selections with that. I think one of my theories for why it hasn’t gotten super-popular is because it’s limiting in terms of how many things you can shove into that wedge because obviously, you know, if you segment a circle in so many different tangents you end up, you know, losing out. Like, it makes it very, very difficult to then start selecting those over time.
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Ryan 00:05:19
It’s probably one of those situations where the weakness is a strength though because it really makes you prioritize. A ways back, I think it was just called SketchBook, there was, like, an Alias SketchBook out for tablets. And that was one of the first really mainstream uses of that pie wedge. And it got so many rave reviews, but then again I don’t really know too many people that use it now. Which is a shame because it was a beautiful interface. I absolutely loved it.
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KH: See, I’m not even aware of that app. So that could be just, like, a marketing issue. I don’t know.
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RP: It’s Alias. They’re the ones that make Maya. They made a sketching app; it was probably a decade ago by now, I think, when I had it. And at that point, I didn’t see this pie menu hardly anywhere. And it was the idea of these kind of gestural flicks. I’m starting to see it now a little bit more with, like, iPad apps, where they’re kind of playing with that idea. Android as well because they’re really heavy on the idea of using the long press.
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Kevin 00:06:11
Yeah. I think the latest, what is it, Honeycomb, I think they had some pie menus in there. Showing it off, the interface although that stuff’s not live now, but I’ll be very interested to see, sort of, how that goes and how that takeaway goes; especially with touch interfaces.
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Ryan 00:06:25
Yeah. Starting with Honeycomb, they seem like they’re really, you know, doubling down on interface stuff.
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KH: I’m trying to think. So mine was…, what was the other designer at SuperConf talking about?
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RP: You mean Chris?
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KH: Yeah. Yeah.
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RP: So he was talking about how do you basically come up with a design for, like, the topic was 200 million and they had doubled numbers since he had wrote the post.
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Kevin 00:06:47
Yeah. That was a really great presentation. And it’s a much higher level overview, but it’s interesting because it’s about process and it’s about, sort of, interaction. And it shows, sort of, the dirty side. It was, like, when you’re building it, you know, and changing interface with actual users, you see that, you know, everything affects you and it’s just, like, you’re juggling lots of variables and such. And, like, how they sort of handled it is sort of amazing.
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Ryan 00:07:12
I liked him really delving into that angle of how to make your interface kind of blend in with any environment that it might be stuck in. Like, what a frustrating problem that must be to have a form that has to look good no matter what someone does to their Website.
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Kevin 00:07:27
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. The thing is, like, a lot of time we try to do our best with, like, smart defaults, but one of the things our users love is our theme designer; so you can customize a theme. So a lot of times, like, them making it not look good inside of their own Websites or making it clash is all doing it on their own. So I always find it interesting; the decisions that the users think are applicable for embedding onto their Website.
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RP: Yeah. It’s a very different approach than what he was describing; where it’s basically no controls for the users, but they’ll just do their best to kind of make it be okay.
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Kevin 00:07:58
The thing is, I think, I don’t even actually know the numbers. I would say 75% of users just use their default themes. And so there’s a small subset that will customize and when they do, they really love that feature and ability to, like, make it their own. But I would say, you know, it all depends on the context. Like, it is a can of worms that you open up and can slowly get into, sort of, the Myspace…
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RP: Right.
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KH: …sort of appearance from your users.
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Ryan 00:08:30
Cool. So let’s see. We talked about Fitts’ Law a little bit. Did you want to go into any of the others just in case? Maybe tease it up so people will go check your slide deck out and maybe learn a little bit more.
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Kevin 00:08:40
Well, my favorite is Hick’s Law. And so Hick’s Law, you know, the way a lot of people understand it is, like, you know, the fewer items, the easier it is or faster it is for someone to make a decision. And Hick, the way he sort of designed the experiment, actually, is that he does it with a series of lamps. And he has like four to, I think, eight or twelve lamps set up in different configurations. And then he would turn one lamp on and he would time how long it would take for the experimentee to figure out which lamp was lit up, right? And he’d find out, so it’s sort of like figuring out what is this, sort of, immediate short-term memory and what you can immediately access when a selection of choices are set up. Now based on that, you understand that, yes the more objects it takes more cognitive load to then eventually make a decision. Like, we don’t think in linear terms and then sort of stop. We have to take the whole in order to make a decision. But it turns out that there’s no reading involved, right? You’re just selecting which lamp. All the objects have to be exactly the same as, sort of, the current state. And then the one object that needs to be selected has to be, like, really, really obvious. And so a lot of people like to try to use Hick’s Law in terms of, sort of, menu design where they think, “Okay, you know, as long as I limit the number of menu items it’ll be just fine.” But it turns out that if the person has to read or do, like, this more advanced cognitive load, then it changes the, sort of, pattern recognition system that they use and it becomes very inefficient. So it doesn’t really help you in that cause. Like, you’ll have to definitely do it. And so the only time, sort of, like, grouping will work inside of the mind is when you put things in, sort of, an order that is understood. So, like, alphabetical ordered items helps a little bit in terms of the timing. But then you’re still dealing with a 26 object processing or shifting. So the best places where Hick’s Law actually applies is when you’re doing, sort of, alerts, right? So let’s say you’re thinking, like, a nuclear power plant, where you have a lot of, you know, options and switches and buttons or something. Or you have a giant dashboard as your interface and you need to alert them to, “Hey, there’s an error or there’s something big going on here or, you know, there’s a nuclear meltdown happening or the rods need to be retracted.” What you do is, you know, you take into context, like, how many switches and lights are in that situation, right, and that will help you figure out the timing it would take for someone to immediately understand that there’s something, an issue or somthing wrong there. So Hick’s Law is really, really interesting. So it’s all about, sort of, limiting, like, when you want them to know the next most important action you limit the number of objects on the screen. So how many interface elements and stuff. So it’s really good for, like, starting interfaces, alerting interfaces, and emergency and trouble, sort of, warnings.
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RP: That’s cool. And then, you know, the whole concept of cognitive load, that leads into Miller’s Law pretty nicely.
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KH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. And they really go hand in hand. Miller’s Law talks about, sort of, working capacity. So, like, how many objects can the mind really juggle in that, sort of, very, very, very short-term memory; that working memory. And what most people used to think, well, you know, seven plus or minus two. And it turns out that’s sort of like this urban myth. That really it’s very dependent on context; and the context being the language of the person that’s speaking. And so these people that argue that it’s really based on, sort of, the phonological loop, right? That the amount of time that someone can say the number of objects or whatever it is they’re dealing with in two seconds of sound, right? And this loop that you can keep in your head and then keep very, very quickly going over head. And it turns out, so while Americans can do about five to seven digits, the Chinese can do between seven and nine digits because their counting system, because it’s very short, one-syllable sounds, they can go through them much more quickly and they have this larger working capacity for digits. But actually, if you’re dealing with words or concepts or sentences, the number of objects actually decreases. So on average, you know, the chunk capacity of people is between four plus or minus one, actually. So as long as you keep things between, you know, three to four objects on a screen when you need to have them immediately process something. So choices, you keep people moving as fast as possible if you have to do something. And whenever you move into, it’s like, five or more objects, you will see a significant slowdown by the user in terms of processing things at a sort of quick pace.
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Ryan 00:13:12
And that’s cool because, you know, actually knowing these numbers and kind of seeing where they come from, I think other than that people tend to say, “Well, you need to group things together.” But that doesn’t actually help if your groups are too big, right? Like, the idea of breaking a number into small, you know, small hyphen-split chunks so people can kind of enter them faster. But then if you go and you put, like, you know, the hyphen after ten; kind of an extreme case, right? But that idea, it doesn’t actually solve the problem.
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Kevin 00:13:40
Right. And the thing is I did some examples from Wufoo and there’s lots of different places you can see this, but what we do ourselves is have it so that there’s chunks even inside the interface. So they understand that, like, as you go through stuff we do our best to make it so that when people working with different, you know, very complicated setups or configurations that they’re always dealing with, like, these mini-chunks so that when you’re looking at something, you know, there’s a finitive level. And a lot of times we use colors and shapes to sort of help understand where the different chunks are and we make sure that there’s no more than three to four things that anyone has to deal with in a major chunk on there. And we find that it works really, really well. It helps people sort of, you know, see, “Oh, I remember,” you know, and actually helps documentation recall happen a lot faster as a result when you do, sort of, that. And it helps us understand that when we’re writing our documentation, we write in terms of, like, what are the chunks that need to be worked on. So it’s a good system for us to look at something and so it allows us to go, you know, let’s dive in little bit by little bit. Like, as we go up, there’s always structure and order that keeps things on sort of this ratio of objects to one another.
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RP: Cool. So I guess let’s go ahead and talk about number five, right? Number five was the Power Law of Practice.
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Kevin 00:14:52
Yeah. The Power Law of Practice is a really easy one and, basically, it’s the more you practice, the faster you’re able to do a task or object. And there’s actually some controversy I talk about a little bit in the beginning. That, well, there’s this controversy of, like, is it really a Power Law or is it an Exponential Law? But for the most part, the takeaway’s still pretty sound. And it’s remarkable in that it’s not one of those lines that eventually decays every time that after you get to a certain point that, you know, you’ll stop improving in time. It’s actually one of those things, like, even if you’ve been doing something, like, a hundred million times, you do it a hundred million one times more, you get a little bit better at the task. So they find, like, cigar rollers. They kept getting better in their times the more and more they practiced, regardless of whether they were doing it for one year or, like, you know, twenty years of their life, which is sort of this amazing thing that, you know, just by the act of practicing or repetition the better someone gets. So it’s always important when you’re designing interfaces that you get people to go to this state where they do something at least more than once, right? Because the first time they do something, it will always be the most difficult and the slowest time they can do it. So always encouraging that, “Hey, try it one more time.” Or showing them that they can do something again or getting them to come back to try something again is super-important because, you know, just after a couple of days or after even, you know, one hour of doing something over and over again, someone will feel like this feels intuitive and it has to do with, like, them making it intuitive for themselves.
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Ryan 00:16:18
Right. Yeah. Talk about intuitions, it’s so loaded, right? Because I think people like to use that word incorrectly a lot and, you know, intuitions derive from past experiences. So the idea of, like, how do you, you know, get people ramped up to that feeling so that they can feel like they already know what it is.
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Kevin 00:16:35
Yeah. And one of the things I talk about is, like, it’s led us to create, like, interfaces that are different from, sort of, newbies vs., you know, the professionals of your app. So, like, you know, your pro users, we don’t, you know, try to show all these, sort of, wizard tutorials and all this help stuff. Like, we streamlined interface; we take away certain help text, like, once we know they’ve seen it for a certain number of times. And the whole point is to make it feel like for the pros that it feels even faster and faster because they know what information to ignore and for the new user, you know, we do our best to make it so it’s, like, that first time experience is, like, overloaded with guidance. And then as, you know, we know that they’re probably not going to be reading that help text, we slowly take it away.
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Ryan 00:17:16
And another thing that’s interesting that it’s basically the recurring thing is, kind of, understanding why these things work will help guide people to make those choices too; because I think a lot of times having the beginning interface vs. the power-user interface people kind of know that maybe that’s something that they ought to do, but bearing in mind this idea of, you know, Power Law of Practice, the patterns should be similar at least. Like, you can take the training wheels off, but you don’t want to change the way that they ride a bike.
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Kevin 00:17:43
Right, right, right. Like you said, the biggest thing is to focus on repeat performance. Like, getting the new person to come back over and over again. And then once you’ve got it set that up, there’s no need to kind of try to remind the pro users to, “Hey, keep coming back and practicing and practicing,” whatever. Like, you don’t have to, I guess, be as bothersome, but you don’t have to remind them as much to try different stuff. Because there’s lots of times, like, it’s for the new users. They won’t try every new feature, whatever, and so we try to guide them, you know, process that along. Whereas, like, the pro users, once you know that they tried a significant number of stuff, like, they have their flow figured out; they understand their stuff. And so you try to back off and leave them alone; let them do their own sort of magic. But, yeah. Agreed. Like, you don’t not use all the other previous laws when you design for both interfaces. It’s just, like, one focuses less on, like, coming back.
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Ryan 00:18:32
It’s very cool. Yeah. It’s a great presentation. We’ll link up your slide deck in the show notes so everybody can kind of check that out. Especially this is, you know, more of a developer-centric audience so I think they’ll really like to know that we’re thinking about numbers too sometimes; not just drop-shadows.
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Kevin 00:18:49
Yeah. Definitely. And the thing is, if you didn’t catch it over at SuperConf, like, I’m talking throughout, doing different presentations throughout the country for this BarCamp tour. Actually, we partnered with a number of different companies like Shopify, BatchBlue, MailChimp, Grasshopper Group. And what we’re doing is just going in and helping add our flavors to different BarCamps across the country. We just did our first one at Boston. And so we’re, you know, we’re doing presentations like this and, like, I have another one that I do on how to run a startup or company like Genghis Kahn, which is a really fun one that looks into history and stuff. And yeah, we’re hoping, you know, if you’re running a BarCamp, come and apply at barcamptour.com and we’ll take a look at your BarCamp and consider whether, you know, coming to your BarCamp and helping enhance it and do the afterparty and do our thing and mingle around and come and hang out with us.
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Ryan 00:19:43
That sounds awesome for everybody involved. It seems like a really good way for you guys to spend your marketing dollars and it gives you that community, you know, like, you’re really helping out various local communities, which is funny because it’s not necessarily your local community.
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Kevin 00:19:59
I mean, we have users all across the nation. So it’s really, like, you know, most of the time I’ve only been able to do, like, sort of, BarCamps and presentations in Florida, but definitely we’re trying to, like, branch out. We love the BarCamps. The thing is, BarCamps weren’t very popular when we were first starting Wufoo. And I know it would have been a huge, sort of, boon and asset or resource for us. I know it would have been something we heavily participated and give back to, like, you know, at the time we only had our blog to give away all our stuff, but that is just, like, we find it to be a really inspirational moment and if there’s anything we can do to sort of, like, foster that environment, that we know we could have taken advantage of, like, you know, we feel like we’re obligated to participate.
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Ryan 00:20:38
Cool. Yeah. That’s awesome. And that topic sounds great. And it just seems like it’s kind of fun/quirky. Seems like the kind of thing that how do you pass it up when you see the post-it note on the wall.
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Kevin 00:20:50
Oh, yeah. It’s a delight. Everyone has a lot of fun. There’s, like, music and drums and all this sort of crazy stuff that happens in the thing. So you get to talk about mayhem and horrible, like, sort of, war techniques and interesting, innovative ways of, like, managing troops and stuff and in addition to seeing how, like, you can use it in, sort of, in your Web 2.0 startup, so it’s kind of cool.
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RP: Any place in Florida that I’ll be able to see this talk anytime soon?
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Kevin 00:21:12
I don’t know about soon, but I know Tampa BarCamp happens sometime around September, so I’ll definitely be doing it there again because a lot of people missed it. Is there anything else happening? I know that the guys over at LessConf, but they always have theirs in Atlanta. I don’t think I can make it to that one. But, yeah, I’ll definitely let you know.
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Ryan 00:21:36
That’s awesome. And that leads into another thing. So now that we’ve set the hook with all the math (the developer audience), let’s talk a little bit about this experience that you foster over there. I’m pretty sure most people listening to this probably know of Wufoo. If not, they should go check it out. Read some of this microcopy because I think it’s that style that a lot of people on the Web are kind of trying to be like, right? Because you do it very successfully in that it’s kind of quirky and it’s fun without being too ham-fisted. Like, it just kind of feels right and it, you know, it makes you smirk while you’re doing it. So you want to talk about that?
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Kevin 00:22:09
Yeah, sure. I think the first thing, obviously, we try to do is, like, we set our priorities straight. So the number one value, the number one thing we’re always working on is, sort of, like, ease of use. So we take all this math stuff and we apply it the best that we can to make something that is very easy to use. And we make sure everything’s functional, it’s working, and as bug-free as possible. Like, we take that to the highest, sort of, quality that we can take it. We take it to the point of craftsmanship. And so we know that if any of those things go wrong, we know that all of our wit and humor will not compensate for it. If anything, it will multiply it as, sort of, like, disappointment and anger towards something not working. So we’re really, really careful on that. And the second thing is, like, we’re very, very careful on, sort of, the way or anything we do that’s trying to be clever. Like, we know there’s always a fine line there. And we’re never trying to be funny or humorous; it’s always trying to be, sort of, something that’s delightful and a surprise. And it’s kind of hard line, but we’re not trying to make people, like, sort of, belly laugh because we know that humor is one of those things that definitely is super, super subjective. So we figure, like, we can just settle on smiling as they’re using the interface, you know, maybe we can sort of catch up on it. A lot of things has to do with, you know, it’s little things that are like little quotes or it’s, sort of, the language that we use; whether it’s, like, Latin phrases, sort of, in the signup and pricing pages. It’s, like, stuff that doesn’t take away from the primary objectives of the page, but if you’re sitting there for a little bit longer and paying a little bit more attention, then you’ll find something that, you know, others wouldn’t normally. For example, like, on our login link we have a little dinosaur T-Rex there that has no explanation. But if you hover over it, it sort of, like, roars at you. It’s something that, you know, it’s not meant for every user to find, but for those that do find it, it’s like, you know, this’ll, sort of, it’ll brighten up your day sort of moment.
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Ryan 00:23:55
Yeah. A little Easter egg kind of thing. For the most part, it seems like, yeah, you do feel very focused. It’s not like, sometimes when you go to interfaces and it’s very clever and yet I can’t figure out, kind of, where do I start, where do I go from here, or what is it that they do. And it sort of makes you think about, you know, like, watching Avatar, you know. Say what you will about it, but they focus very, very hard on making it pretty, but, you know, maybe some of that budget could have went to writers. And it’s sort of the opposite side when you look at some of these interfaces. It’s like, “That’s very cute and cheeky”; maybe you should have engineered it so that I didn’t have to see your 404 so much.
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Kevin 00:24:34
Right, right, right. I think a large part of what helps us in that case is, sort of, like, our design philosophy. We set this value where, like, we make every single employee in the company, whether you’re an engineer or a designer, you have to do customer support. And so it sets this value that, ultimately, you’re going to be responsible for whatever it is that you create or manifest. And so if you have to see the repercussions of your decisions, you will be much more, sort of, conscious of making sure that people get the information that they need, whether it’s documentation or tooltips and stuff. But also, you’ll do your best to make things as easy as possible because what you want to do is reduce customer support and at the point where you have to sort of achieve it. Because, you know, it’s really, really interesting because what it does, it sets the value on this long term relationship rather than just focusing on, like, how do I create something cool or neat-looking, right? It’s ultimately, like, how do I create something that reduces the amount of customer pain when I have to deal with it.
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RP: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, it’s definitely, it’s played very evenly or even-handed. And it just kind of works right, right?
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Kevin 00:25:39
I’m always glad to hear that because it’s the stuff that always makes us sort of, like, anxious a bit. Because I know that feels like we do it and it’s, like, really easy, but it’s stuff that we really work hard on. We really play with a lot of different phrases and stuff. And we don’t, you know, we don’t usually, like, user-test it and all that stuff, but we try to get a good feel for it. And now, I think, after doing it for a while, we feel like we kind of have the pulse on it, but always, you know, trying and playing with stuff and trying to re-think stuff in a lot of different contexts. Like, it’s always interesting to hear, especially from international users, like, what they’ll see of certain, sort of, words and phrases. And also understanding, like, some people don’t understand the context of certain things. So some of our Shakespeare quotes, like, it’s not immediately apparent, like, they know that it’s from Shakespeare. And some of them have taken offense and such, not realizing the context of them. So we’re always, like, playing with, sort of, our references all the time.
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Ryan 00:26:27
That’s interesting. Yeah, I’ve definitely been on the bad side of trying to make a, like, a pop culture reference or something like that that just doesn’t resonate. And you think, “Oh, yeah, if you don’t know the context of that, that is probably a terrible thing for me to say right now.”
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Kevin 00:26:41
Right, right, right. I have to say that we are not very pop culture subjects. Our interests are either, like, literary reference or interest of, like, a nine year old boy. So it’s either, like, dinosaurs, robots, and, sort of, ninjas or you’re going to get, like, Shakespeare and Latin. So it’s, like, one or the other.
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Ryan 00:27:02
That’s another thing that I think is pretty interesting about it is for the most part, anybody would describe the feel of the company as, you know, quirky and clever. And then most of your plans, and there’s so many references to Latin, which I think if you generally ask people how they feel about that, they think about that class in college that they hated. Right? It’s interesting that you take something that, intuitively, people, kind of, would feel would otherwise be boring, but you really play it in a way that it’s a lot of fun. Like the whole Tabula Rasa quote just cracks me up.
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Kevin 00:27:36
Right. I think it’s context. Like, we do the interesting, you know, juxtaposition. And, obviously, none of the stuff, Latin, is like the Latin that you absolutely know to get something done. Like, we don’t describe something in Latin that is, like, absolute, like, it’s like, not crucial information is, you know, tied up in the Latin. It’s always stuff that, like, it’s on the periphery. But I always thought Latin was a really funny language. And even though everyone keeps telling me it’s a dead language, I love trying to, like, squeeze phrases in whenever I can. So that’s sort of like the, you know, the root of it for me. Kind of like, “Oh, it would be funny if people kept talking in Latin for, like, all this different kind of stuff.”
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Ryan 00:28:14
Well, the good thing about it, the thing that makes it generally kind of funny, conversationally, if you make, you know, make a reference to quid pro quo to someone. Like, people either get it or they don’t. And if they don’t, like, that’s kind of what makes wit work, right? The idea that you throw away a line and you move on from it. And it’s going to make someone smile and if people don’t, it doesn’t break the flow of the conversation, which is what you do with your interfaces.
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KH: Definitely. Definitely.
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RP: Well, thanks a lot, Kevin, for your time. This was great. Hopefully we’ve got a few of the developers thinking a little bit more like designers or at least, you know, respecting some of the choices on a new level.
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KH: Awesome. Thanks a lot, Ryan. This was a delight and a lot of fun to do.