Why cards are the future of the web
insideintercom.io
insideintercom.io
Other than that, a card's only defining feature is that it is a grouping of text, images, and links, which has been common on the web since 1993.
Is the idea more that we are moving towards groupings of content which can be consumed by themselves?
"don't think 'rectangle', think flipping, folding, expanding, stacking, grouping, sorting"
So yes, it's rectangular display groupings, but also small-chunks, repurposeable, and amenable to certain interactions reminiscent of physical cards.
I haven't read the article fully yet, but this seems reasonable to me.
That is, when you stack playing cards for use in, say, solitaire, you only have to see a very small portion of the card. Specifically, what suite and value it has. The only reason the cards are the same size is actually to conceal this information when they are turned around.
Contrast this with how I currently scan news headlines in most rss software. By seeing a list of the headlines. Sure, I don't know what the body of the messages are without opening them fully, but the entire point is that I do not feel I have time to read all of the articles and I am relying on a well written summary in the form of a title for my first level of curation.
Moving this to Twitter and the "card" api. I fail to see how focusing on making everything cards will necessarily be better than just focusing on keeping it small.
Consider, I can quickly scan all of my emails from my phone, not because each is presented as a cute card, but because the "list" metaphor has already won there. The effort placed in making the entire message "look good" on the phone is completely avoided by keeping the message "textual" and giving me a list of subjects and authors.
Similarly, twitter has dominance not because they are aiming for "cards," but because their content is guaranteed short. And really, I don't know as that this is a groundbreaking discovery. It is the reason "headline news" is the most disseminated. Sure, fancy graphics and cute typography is a wonderful differentiator, but few things compete with a well done title.
Technically, cards are not far away from any other previous content-delivery system; what's specific to them is their structure - centered around easy-to-scan bits of content, that can be directly linked to. This makes them more apt for social sharing and aggregation than the classic web of interlinked whole pages. Some have pointed out how they increase the granularity of content.
I also foresee them being used as the basis for an end-user development platform, a la Bret Victor's interactive drawing (but not necessarily geometric), as this structure is friendlier and simpler than semantic markup. I believe that this metaphor could close the gap that "Visual Basic", widget-based languages had respect the need to use imperative languages to define behavior.
That "cards can be manipulated" is actually a good thing. It allows both the content creator and the end user to select which tools to use for handling the content. In web pages, snippets can only be manipulated with whatever tools the content platform provides; conversely, RSS feeds are entirely handled by the client, and it's difficult for the content provider to specify some suggested tools (other than cues to some pre-defined microformats).
Imagine a system where users could share content cards like they do on current social webs, but where they're able to define new simple automatic procedures in the way that Victor's "programming-by-drawing-comic-strips" allows for, and I think that's the future of the user-facing side of the web. Hypercard shows that the card metaphor is a good basis for this; and the standards are finally mature enough to make such a system possible on the web.
The essence of the card is that it contains a fixed, small amount of content that can be linked to and reused at different contexts, not that you 'always' have to interact with it in a fixed "3x4 inches" format. If you try out the Smallest Federated Wiki below, you can drag-and-drop cards within a page, but the page doesn't seem to built from cards (although it is). Pages can be created by composing cards and giving them lightweight styles (such as removing the visual frames around them, or showing them in list formats).
If it helps you, this is how I picture a system programmable by the end user through cards:
- The structure is roughly like in the 10/GUI concept demo:[1]
* Information is organized in non-overlapping plaques.
* Plaques can be shown folded (cards), unfolded (pages) or minimized (links).
* Plaques are hyper-linked; clicking on links open related plaques like in the Smallest Federated Wiki. [2]
- Users can create new cards (this is what's missing in current card-based systems, which are read-only):
* Creating a card's structure is like creating a dialog in a traditional visual GUI builder, by composing small elements in a larger layout.
* The card's behavior is programmed with the interactive comic-strip operations that Bret Victor demoed recently in the "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" demo. [3]
Does such system make sense? Can you picture it?
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[1] http://www.gizmag.com/10gui-multi-touch-interface/13104/
[2] http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/hsi.fed.wiki.org/h...
But, back to the idea of a card containing a fixed amount of content. This seems no different than the semantic idea of RSS or even HTML. Items have dates, links, titles, and descriptions. "Unfolding" is simply following the link to the full item. Seen this way, I am not at all sure how what you are describing is much different than an RSS UI. (Indeed, if you drop the idea of moving and editing items, and move the orientation to vertical, this is the old google reader. Or, the current gnus. :) The only difference is "opening related plaques" becomes "launching relevant related application.")
I argue that twitter gained success because they effectively dropped the link/description part and set a hard limit on how large the title could be. Probably more importantly, they provide the hosting service for everyone.
More directly, twitter has seen success largely by limiting the interactions and capabilities available to users. This would leave the interface we are talking about largely more confusing than twitter, without being as powerful as just giving access to the raw data. More confusing for the less interested audience, and less capable for the more interested audience.
All of this is to say that I am not at all against you doing this. Indeed, I welcome the advances that may come. Sadly, I still can not picture it myself. Instead, I see the ashes and poor reflections of previous offerings.
What changes is that they're now visible to the end user, while their structure previously could only be accessed by the system's developer. Now they can be published through an API, or directly manipulated from a GUI; that's a change in focus - the same operations can be done on the content, but different people can perform them if they are published as atomic cards instead of embedded in larger, whole documents.
Semantic-aware interfaces are less based on applications and more on tasks. These interfaces work just like with the old CLI, where instead of loading data into an app (where available commands are selected and composed by the developer), you have a information flowing through a "pipe" of independent commands selected by the user from all commands available in the system. Environments like KDE Plasma Active [1] (still app-based, but with "Activities" that represent tasks), or the old Cannon Cat and its spiritual succesor Archy (which was a graphical version of Emacs, sort of) [2], are examples of this model of interaction. These are not new concepts, really, but they've never been fully realized in graphical interface (afaik only the Canon Cat and Emacs follow them, and both are text-based).
Yes, Google Reader is a good example of the kind of content aggregation and sharing that I'm pursuing with my ideal system (and many people found it useful, so there's an audience for it). Google Now is another system which has chosen the card metaphor to show information according to context. But Reader was not programmable, as it had fixed styling that couldn't be changed by the end-user; and Google Now has fixed rules created by the provider, not the user. I believe that the card is a natural data structure for people that don't have a programming background to create simple procedures, that would allow users to create new behaviors for these tools.
You've given me some thoughts to chew with the "more confusing than twitter, less powerful than raw data"; I'm certainly aiming for "more powerful than twitter", and I'll have to ponder how to achieve that without making it too confusing. I have some ideas, but it's interesting that you identified this problem.
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[1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/plasma-active-new-approa... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy
I definitely look forward to anything that is coming our way. Seriously best of luck on your endeavors here! I have already greatly appreciated the links you've given me.
"Here's some websites that put information in boxes" is plausible but not very interesting; "cards are the future of the web" is more interesting, but doesn't really have any evidence to support it.
The real key here is standardizing the various metadata formats, such as the title field; which ranges from Twitter's `twitter:title` to Facebook's `og:title`.
[1]: I'm building my augmented reality data network, http://aris.io, based on a similar premise, but abstracting these out to explicit "providers".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol#C...
I thought that the convergence of mobile markup with desktop markup was a great idea, as long as one didn't overload pages with extraneous content.
Really, today's mobile devices are quite capable, and to limit these clients by relegating them to "card" based presentation seems like a step, or two, backwards.
I'm still browsing a fair number of sites that fall outside of social media and "sharing sites". Twitter for me is mostly for news and some social interaction where I see cards being used effectively, Pinterest is nice to look at from time to time, but I'm not stuck there either.
Now more and more people are confusing Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and family with "The Web", but a fair amount of content still resides on independent sites. That leaves a vast majority of independent sites that may or may not modify their markup to be "card-friendly".
Also, Twitter makes their card-friendly markup explicit and I'm not sure that's gonna fly for the long term. If everyone is willing to standardize on Schema.org markup OTOH, then I'd say it's acceptable.
I've definitely found that bringing that simpler design from mobile to desktop has tested well with people in a lot of situations.
People are used to interacting with 2D objects in the world. It feels natural. "Cards" provide a strong figure-ground relationship and let the viewer chunk content. It's the same idea as section headings or pull-quotes in articles.
I hope we can also get to direct manipulation of objects. I'm really sick of clicking/tapping verbs to do an action on an object. We should have some other proxy for behavior than words.
But now, some designers have found their new hammer and everything looks like a nail.
The trick to all of this is finding gestures (or whatever you want to call them) that allow some sort of direct manipulation in areas where the human mind has no experience. The best example right now is pinch-to-zoom, which has absolutely no physical equivalent, but is extremely intuitive. Compare this to having arrow and +/- magnifying glass buttons.
As software blends more with the rest of the world, the machine-intentioned interaction is breaking down. It's kind of like trying to draw a photorealistic image using an etch-a-sketch, when instead you just need a pen and paper.
(You could argue that pinch-to-zoom isn't very discoverable/learnable, but the reality is that people figure it out incredibly quickly, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. There's certainly something magically compelling about using one's hands in that way. Perhaps it's actually more important for interfaces to be instantly learnable than "intuitive.")
One thing that worries me is that a conjunction is non-indexable (if you have an index then you turn it back into a disjunction).
Ultimately, this means that the address bar (i.e. the thing that lets us index into the web) will become even less useful, and there won't be a canonical way of sharing content; just a bunch of varieties of “share this” buttons.
I am not against “cards” per se, but I am worried about what the “appification” of the Internet portends. The web put most of the intelligence in the nodes rather than the network (in contrast to, say, cable television). Apps are reversing that. Now if I want to share content, I can no longer easily do so without the network(s) knowing about it. Intelligent networks scare me.
One more thing about disjunctions vs. conjunctions: the former is about random access whereas the latter is about sequential access. Sequentially accessed stuff is consumed by streaming. So I am afraid that what we are going to end up with are a bunch of domain names/apps that correspond to streams; or in other words, cable TV 2.0.
Next thing you know now there's CPU & memory meter for cards.
Every post is just title, main content in a giant font and a back button. It seems some content creators are tired of shiny doodads.
I certainly prefer that to the geocities/myspace level of razzamatazz.
The biggest reason why companies & brands are taking to cards, and why consumers should be wary of them is the _seamless and transparent transfer of our demographic & contextual information with every click_.
>> The aggregation depends on: >> The person consuming the content and their interests, preferences, behaviour. >> Their location and environmental context. >> Their friends’ interests, preferences and behaviour. >> The targeting advertising eco-system.
Cards take away the control & choice from users about what information they want to transmit to brands through their browsing. That can only be done when we're constantly logged into services from Google, Twitter, Pinterest etc.
I'm not sure that is the future web I dream of.
No, they are almost totally irrelevant to my business, I'm a doctor/plumber/painter/...
I have no firsthand experience with the business of painters and plumbers. But thinking about other types of contractors, they do spend their whole day going around to customers (i.e. they are highly mobile). My last HVAC service call involved the technician using a tablet to enter my AC unit's serial number for a real-time warranty check. He then ordered a new part right there in front of me and I signed the sheet with my finger. I expect lots of plumbers would do the same thing with a hot water heater or similar complex repair.
Sure, and a lot have iPads. But it's still quite peripheral to what the do 90% of the time -- and they could do the same almost as well on their laptop already.
That depends on the doctor. But generally doctors spend ~20% of their day doing data entry. The rest of the time, in general practice, family, etc. clinics, doctors need an EHR at their fingertips when talking to patients and other care providers and carrying an iPad around with an EHR designed for the iPad from the ground up is easier than most desktop-based EHR software.
Could do the same almost as well on their laptop.
Misunderstands why a person uses an iPad instead of a laptop.
The example of Facebook is apt, as their system is all about discrete, short bits of content (ie. "cards") being shuffled into different views. Despite this Facebook has I think wisely avoided the skeuomorphism of actual card designs.
The concept of cards definitely has legs. The more integrated and easily consumable we can make the web, the better. But the designs don't necessarily matter to that concept.
Oh come on folks! A card is a good metaphor for a small collection of related bits of data (and wait for the JQuery library coming soon) but really - the future ? For some UX design needs - yes. But we will always need deeper references.
This new incarnation has to do with facebook and twitter's inclination to actually retrieve the contents of a user supplied inline link to try and show a "preview" inline, so you're not just clicking into the link blindly. The twitter card concept is about giving the people at the destination of that URL some control over the appearance of that twitter preview- by the use of metadata/microformats-like markup. This level of control is starting to approach the uncanny valley of resembling the above Palm-Pre-like card concept; turning the preview into the app functionality itself.
Every so often someone comes out with a 'new' idea to simplify (or make redundant) the design process. Separating discrete snippets of information to be consumed or processed independently, but situated as part of a greater whole, is design. There is no magic bullet. You will still need designers.
I've implemented something like that in a yet to release project recently, without even thinking of the concept of card. Being a responsive app, it looked to me like an obvious choice.
I've put some lorem ipsum content in those cards, and it looked just beautiful. ... then I placed real content. Shit happened.
Simply using float won't do it when cards have different height, it looks too ugly and have a lot of random almost entirely blank lines.
The look and feel of pinterest was good enough for the type of content I wanted to display, so I had a look to how they did it : every card is absolutely positioned to form a compact canvas, which means they have to compute every card position based on which will be shown.
I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve, but it seems to me it's not that responsive friendly, because it's not css friendly : the straighter solution to make it responsive is to have cards using the whole width of the block they're all in, or to have them all the exact same height.
EDIT : to illustrate this : http://jsfiddle.net/uV645/3/ Resize browser by width to see effect.
But those plugins are a perfect fit that I didn't know of, thanks for it !
It's still something that have to be done through javascript, though. So I guess we probably have to consider cards canvas as a feature rather than as a design element (like calendars, graphs, etc).
Apple got it right with the iPhone menu structure, which was inspired by the iPod (maybe they nailed it because it was not card-based). There, columns always maintain the same positional relation (there are menus to the "left" and sub-menus to the "right"), so you can always remember by muscle-memory where a particular item is located relative to the others. Re-flowing similar items breaks those relations.
Responsive pages make sense when the side columns are used for side content (i.e. "aside" tags, headers and footers, navigation...) - there, placing the sub-content above or below the main content to show it on a narrow screen is not a problem, since the moved card was subordinate to the main article anyway.
I guess formatting RSS and scraped sites / APIs can do all that, but perhaps we can start packaging our content to be more portable as well.
Could micro content have a unique hash? Is that how social sites track reccomendations or do they use the URL?
> Content consumption on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Line, you name it, is all built on the card design metaphor.
I think this makes sense as a design metaphor. Just as "skeuomorphism" was able to help people develop familiarity with iOS by relating it to the real world, "cards" helps us think about how we organize information for faster consumption.
There was something about reading books and magazines before the web came, a gamified experience, because you could more visibly see your progress. On the web you might have read the equivalent of a 1000 page book but you never get the sense of that.
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In 'Broad Adaption', we see Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook and LinkedIn all embracing this approach and in 'Well Defined Card Types', we see Photos, Videos, News Items, Maps, Offers, Recommendations.
(Cue the stone tablet markers in three, two...)