Comments on: Are we in for perpetual innovation?

By: johne

johne — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:55:32 +0000

Years ago, one of Jakob Nielsen’s “Alertbox” essays (no time to look it up, sorry) was about experimental subjects’ resistance to innovative web navigation schemes. There had been a period in which new ideas of how a browser should interface with sites had aroused the active interest of the people who tested them, but there came a point when the reaction was more one of impatience, along the lines of, “We already have a perfectly good way to do that, what’s the point?”

Of course the classic example of the same process is the adoption of the QWERTY keyboard. Maybe not the best, but considered good enough by most.

By: James Cherkoff

James Cherkoff — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:32:17 +0000

As my pal @johnniemoore would say – innov-already! ;-)

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:11:34 +0000

Elizabeth Eisenstein extensively documents these sorts of issues with respect to the printing press and book printing in Europe. We’ve done cute things with physical books, but the navigation metaphors have sustained since (before) Gutenberg, even transcending to ebook media. I would say that we’re likely to drag along the early constructs as they become more-or-less settled, although there will always be room for “cuteness.”

The earliest threaded forum structures, for example, were an artefact of the hack that created Usenet (because it was really, really expensive to join Arpanet back in the 1970s). That artefact still remains, nominally as a best practice in online, distance education, for instance, and as the comment/reply structure in almost every web application going.

We’re seeing a lot of transition innovation occurring now-ish as we begin to move away from print-culture constructs and towards UCaPP constructs. But during the last three communication transitions, the winning metastructures sustained, and sustain to today. No reason to believe that we contemporary folk are any different.