Don Norman notes a few ways by which interactive objects are given special characteristics to enable use. The developers of new media often use two remedial techniques to ease the user’s acceptance and operational fluency of the medium: constraints and skeuomorphic cues. Constraints can be temporal or spatial; each limiting what the user can do at any given time or position. These design decisions in effect establish expectations how certain elements are layed out of future versions of a medium. When these expectations are improved or defied, the adjustment can become irritating to reactive users. When applications are updated and their interfaces undergo a restructure, many users take up their pitchforks and attack. Why is the reaction so passionate? Users not only are comfortable with the old, but truly have adapted their way of thinking because of this layout. A good example of this is the confusion that occurs when the layout of an application leads the user to believe more content is hidden outside of a viewport and can be accessed by scrolling, but for whatever reason the action can’t be performed. Children born in the age of tablets assume print magazines can be zoomed in with the pinch and spread of two fingers.

The size of our devices ebbs and flows, but on the whole, the screens that demand our most frequent attention are shrinking. To compensate for the decreasing viewport size, design considerations require layouts that force the user to use additional gestures & operations to access the additional content. This in turn makes the integration between user and device more intimate. Added investment clouds our ability to divorce ourselves out of this relationship. As more of our lives are loaded onto these devices, our entire realm of existence is transferring to this medium. The third place, a living environment aside from home and work, i.e. coffee shops, bars, churches, parks etc..., is being inadequately substituted by the interactions found on our small devices. It is simply a matter of fact that humans, as social beings, cannot be sated by this depersonalization and centralization of life. No matter how advanced the devices become, the artificiality of this new scope of life is incompatible with a person’s social needs.