Zooming Into a Future That Doesn’t Suck
Why was the tree excited about the future? It was ready to turn over a new leaf!
Hi. Welcome to our new website all about silver linings. Takes a bit of bravery to light up a new part of the internet and say, “Hey, let’s look on the bright side!” during a global pandemic, but here we are.
Before now I didn’t have a lot of experience with pandemics, but after a few months, the thing that’s been most surprising is the boredom. This is a good problem to have, don’t get me wrong. A terrible virus has been ripping around the world doing all sorts of awful harm and personally, the worst thing I’ve had to deal with is being at home for weeks on end.
Reader, I sincerely hope that you’ve been as lucky as I have. If your social life and work-life have been affected more than your life-life, then you’ve had a good 2020 so far.
Work-life, though. Let’s talk about that. Specifically, these things:
What’s that in your background, have you changed rooms? Yeah, no, you need to unmute yourself. Wasn’t Charlie meant to be joining too?
Video meetings are a perfect metaphor for everything that’s wrong with the modern working environment
Meeting over video, 2020-style, takes a pile of shit that people have never liked and serves it up on a technological hellscape.
How can it be so hard to all just log into a meeting, talk with each other for a while, then get on with our day? Why is remembering to unmute yourself so hard for so many people? How many hours have we lost to audio glitches? Is it healthy to be so incredibly familiar with your workmates’ nostrils? Can we please, please learn to talk one at a time? Can we skip the silences where everyone thinks someone else is about to start talking? Isn’t the “meeting room” metaphor completely misleading if there’s no whiteboard? Why don’t we all see each other sitting in the same order? If I point over here do you know what I’m getting at? Why do I keep losing the chat window? And what on earth is that annoying buzzing sound?
These are all good questions, and the answer to the one about nostrils is definitely “no”. But like we said right at the top of this piece, we’re all about the silver linings here.
And when it comes to video meetings, the good news is that humanity has a way of dealing with technology that makes simple things worse. It’s a problem as old as computers – one that I’ve called it megaskeuomorphism ever since I made up the word “megaskeuomorphism” just now.
The world’s recent work-from-home-fest is exactly what we needed to start sorting out video meetings way faster than we solved other flavours of megaskeuomorphism. Flavours with names like “email” and “chatbots”.
Megawhatnow?
Remember “skeuomorphism”? That’s the term that digital design nerds use to describe 2D digital things that are designed to look like real-life 3D things. (It was all over the nerd blogs when Apple released iOS 7 and embraced “flat design”). Think of “Ok” buttons with shading as if they bulge out towards you, or analogue clockfaces on phone screens, or the old Cover Flow in iTunes which presented your digital music like a CD collection.
Skeuomorphism is useful when you want to shift people from a physical-first to a digital-first mindset. I’m old enough to have had a pretty big CD collection, so when I first looked for songs on a screen rather than a shelf, Cover Flow helped make the switch more familiar. I’d never seen all my music listed song-by-song before, but I had spent hours shuffling through album covers, and I knew exactly what songs sat behind each cover. For people without the hangover of a physical music collection, Cover Flow is just a weird way to flick through pictures that are meant to somehow represent music.
Anyway, Cover Flow is dead now.
When they made change.org they gave us all the opportunity to tap into people power and make the world a better place. They probably weren’t expecting this.
Megaskeuomorphism is a level up from skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism deals in objects (buttons, albums, clocks). Megaskeuomorphism deals in entire interactions.
To take two examples, we can see email as a reasonable megaskeuomorph of letter writing, and chatbots as a bad megaskeuomorph of human conversation.
And I reckon that we can see video meetings in the same way – as a megaskeuomorph of, well, meetings.
The Megaskeuomorphism Cycle Of Pain and Redemption
If you stand back and squint a bit it’s possible to see a pattern in the way megaskeuomorphism usually plays out. There’s a cycle of pain and redemption that goes something like this:
Something works well in the real world without anyone really having to think about it
⇓
New technology replicates that thing in the digital world
⇓
The replication is imperfect and frustrating
⇓
People find new ways to work with the digital thing
⤺
⤻
The thing changes to suit the way people use it
⇓
The thing evolves so much that it’s now a uniquely digital thing that works well without anyone having to think about it
Email has gone all the way through this, though it still bears the evolutionary marks of its origins. The envelope icon makes as much sense as male nipples. Terms like ‘inbox’, ‘cc’ (carbon copy), and ‘attachment’ with its little paperclip icon remind Gen Xers of the good old days. But the overall “mail” metaphor is dead. Email is its own entity now.
The first year I lived away from home (which may or may not have been last century) I’d keep in touch with my parents by composing a thousand-word screed once a week. I’d thread narratives through otherwise disconnected stories, I’d proofread, I’d sign off properly. All these habits came from letter-writing, and none of them stuck. Like a lot of people, I was doing things that made sense for pieces of paper that would be physically delivered (at a cost and in a couple of days at best).
My parents didn’t take all week to reply, of course. And soon I found myself sending much shorter messages—firing things off a few times a day. Things that I could summarise in a subject line and keep mental track of in an inbox. I moved a long way away from letter writing. Subject lines like “RE: RE: RE: RE: Re: Re: RE: Re: Fw: Fw: Thursday” proliferated.
Those strings of Re: Re: Re: proved that email was morphing further away from letter writing. Inboxes became unwieldy with every ’Re:’ in a new message, so the technology changed too. Gmail introduced threaded emails, and subject lines without any Re:s at all. The first time I saw a string of replies stacked into a single line of my inbox, I wept tears of confusion. Then joy.
(There are countless other things that I could mention here. Typed text carries less emotion than handwriting, so people started using emoticons—then developers introduced emojis. Attachments that have no equivalent in meatspace found life in the digital world as embedded videos. Email costs nothing so people soon discovered that spam could be a job. Filters followed.)
Now when we write emails they are short, immediate, and conversational. The first time I sent a one-line message without a greeting, it felt almost rebellious. Now it’s how this thing is built to work because the technology flexed with us.
Chatbots though
I said I’d write about chatbots too. This story doesn’t have its happy ending yet, because we’re not all the way through the Megaskeuomorphism Cycle Of Pain and Redemption. (This part will actually pick up from another article I wrote for another blog a few years ago. If you’re good enough at Google you’ll be able to find where I started.)
In the same way that someone looked at letters (and memos, and faxes) and thought “I could digitize this stuff and call it email”, someone with a way more self-confidence once looked at people talking to each other and thought, “I could make a robot do that”.
Chatbots first hit the internet more than a decade ago, and they sucked. They embodied almost every megaskeuomorphism mistake you could think of. Bots were disguised as humans with real-sounding names. They opened with cheery greetings (“Hi! How can I help you today?”) as if they were going to be able to parse regular speech. They most definitely could not parse regular speech.
“Hi,” you’d say.
“Hi!” they’d reply. (If you said hi, they said hi. That was the rule.)
“Can you help me?” you’d ask.
“Yes, I can help you! Just ask,” they’d say.
You’d realise that the person you’re talking to doesn’t know how to advance conversation. You’d wonder how they got a job in customer service.
Taking the lead, you would type two or three sentences to this simpleton. You’d explain what you want from the website you’re visiting. It might sell books, or insurance, or clothes, or travel—it didn’t really matter because the reply was always the same.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand that. Try asking in a different way.”
…and then you realise that you’re dealing with a f*cking megaskeuomorphic bot, and you yell out loud, “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT??”, and your voice is carried to some delusional techbro who would whisper “because one day no-one will be able to tell the difference”, and then you’d turn back to your keyboard.
“Specials.”
“We have a range of specials that you can find here”, the bot would reply, and with that you’d go back to using the internet like a normal person.
Chatbots. All. Sucked.
Issue number one with megaskeumorphic chatbots is what they attempted to replicate. Human conversation is a massive, complicated thing. The more you try to break language down, the slipperier it gets.
Issue number two was all the humanizing, with fake profile photos and “Hi! How are you going?”s. When a bot’s core skill is replying to single-word inputs like “Specials”, it’s not going to fool anyone.
But it doesn’t have to fool anyone, or understand complex language, or be human. It just has to be a good bot.
We’re still at the stage where people are working out how to chat with bots, and botmakers are still discovering new ways to be useful. These days free-flowing conversation is (mercifully) not on anyone’s to-do list. Chat windows make it obvious when they are staffed by bots. People are learning to type things that are something between a search phrase and a whole sentence. Clickable options guide people through chats.
These adaptations are making chatbots more useful, and less like the human interactions that they were originally meant to replace. The Megaskeuomorphism Cycle Of Pain and Redemption is doing its thing.
Sure, but wasn’t this article meant to be about video meetings?
Right now, video meetings are deeply in the ‘Pain’ stage of the cycle. How long until we reach ‘Redemption’?
In the past few months millions of people all over the world have been trying to use Zoom, Google Meet, Whereby, and the like as a direct replacement for office meeting rooms. It hasn’t been fun to stare at stacks of glitchy rectangles and pretend that they’re people seated around a table.
One day we will have online meeting technology that’s designed to work with its own constraints and features. We will know how to use it properly. When we do, we probably won’t be holding things that look like meatspace meetings. But the stuff that we get done—sharing information, trading opinions, demonstrating things that we’ve been working on, setting goals, and even having a laugh together—will be the same.
We’ll see progress over time. Here are some predictions:
- On the user behaviour side, “quick team catch-ups” will fall out of fashion as they deliver less benefit online. I love a no-hierarchy free-for-all as much as the next modern office-goer, but not when our webcams are all slightly out of sync and no-one has a perfect microphone.
- The old skill of running meetings will re-emerge. We’ll see more visible agendas and we’ll place more value on people’s ability to chair meetings well (i.e. fairly decide who talks when and shift the group clearly from one topic to the next).
- People will get better at putting their camera somewhere sensible, i.e. not pointing it up their own nose or directly at a bright sunny window.
- Technology will improve until we don’t need to mute out background hisses, traffic noise, the neighbor’s lawnmower, and all those other noises.
- Non-verbal communication will be rebuilt in a new way that fits the virtual environment. There will be an equivalent of quietly raising eyebrows, or making meaningful eye contact, or making subtle hand gestures. Whether this will be mostly through user adaptation (who could have predicted emoticons?) or through technical tweaks is harder to guess.
- Meetings will blend direct interaction between people with non-live elements (like pre-recorded presentations, or material that everyone should have already read in preparation). Computers are fantastic for editing and displaying information, and meetings are held to share information, so we will discover all sorts of ways to integrate different formats of information into meetings. One day we will mock simple screen-sharing the way we mock fax machines.
- Physical adaptation: Homes will be designed with video meeting spaces built-in. Househunters will assess the acoustics, lighting, and backdrop of that area just like they assess indoor-outdoor flow and how nice the kitchen is.
- Digital meetings will have a growing range of accessibility features that ‘real life’ can’t match, starting with live captioning and on-the-fly translation but soon extending much much further.
The Megaskeuomorphism Cycle Of Pain and Redemption will feel slow, but there will be a day when a Zoom invitation doesn’t look like a stain on your calendar.
Sure, but wasn’t this article meant to be about the pandemic’s role in all this?
When it comes to the upsides of this stupid pandemic, we’re looking at a pretty short list. But the world has clocked up millions of hours of collective time in online meetings. In a few months, it’s become totally normal to have a webcam in front of you, a carefully-messy bookcase behind you, headphones on, and an array of two-dimensional colleagues just out of your eyeline. It’s sucked, but there’s been a lot of it.
In short, we’ve been powering through the phase where we discover all the ways that digital replications of meetings are a bit shit. Even better, we’ve been doing it while we’re anxious and tired and distracted. The entire paradigm has been put through a massive stress test.
A lot of workplaces have already changed the timing and structure of meetings as they’ve learned the limitations of digital infrastructure. The designers and developers of video conferencing apps are flush with oceans of system data and user feedback that could have taken years to collect. Some will also have new piles of cash from investors, which ought to help too.
Around the world, plenty of offices will never return to the way they were before. More people will work from home more often, and more homes will be worked from. Digital meeting technology will be more important than ever, which raises the stakes for everyone who can push that tech more quickly to the bright side of the cycle.
When it gets there I’ll be ready, smiling into a camera. See you soon.
