Zen and Web 2.0? Easier said than done.

Clifton Evans has an interesting article on Boxes and Arrows (Zen and the Art of IA) about viewing Web 2.0 interaction design from the perspective of Zen. Actually, that’s a little unfair - the meat of the article is an excellent review of Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, by Robert Hoekman, Jr. The “Zen and the art of IA” aspect is kind of shoe-horned into the middle of the article.

That’s the bit that makes me uneasy. I can’t help feeling that too glibly dropping the concept of Zen into the process of design makes the whole business sound like it doesn’t, well, actually involve very much hard graft. it also seems to demand (the way its formulated) an awful lot of users.

Now in terms of Von Manstein’s matrix (see FASTForward), I’m definitely on the lazy line with ambitions to be thought as smart (who doesn’t?) So hard work isn’t something I necessarily go looking for if I can find a smart way of getting something done faster. And something that needs to be said clearly is that Zen is very hard work indeed.
The other statement that made me a little uneasy was:

“This notion of the minimal is hugely important within the teachings of zen, turning into the idea that you channel the energy, or features, that are interesting to you as a user.”

Is this really how Web 2.0 works for users? Or how users actually want to consume Web 2.0? I say this in the context of my Netvibes collection of hundreds of feeds, Twitter open in another window, half a dozen more tabs running with references for this post on Firefox…Doesn’t sound very minimal to me.

What am I trying to get at? What, if anything, is pulling my chain? I think it’s perhaps that when engineering new applications, we don’t always pay enough attention to the fact that most people are only going to use them a little bit. Maybe 1% of users are going to use them a lot. But for most people, we’ll be lucky if they integrate anything we use into a tiny subset of their regular activities, and even that will be headspace shared with a dozen or more other competing tools. I suppose I’d summarise my point as speculating that it isn’t enough to design for the perfect minimal, Zen state of mind in a user - that’s akin to demanding that our users pass an exam before we let them anywhere near our software. We have to design for distracted users, careless users, hyper-active users and stupid users, as well intelligent users (for whom we will always be gloriously imperfect).

(As a side note, the other, far more important, principle of Zen which Evans doesn’t mention is compassion. Zen’s goal is perfection but it accepts that perfection is impossible. Without perfection, suffering. Hence, compassion. Feeling compassion for all living things - that’s hard work.)