I was chatting to Max the other day, trying to impress him, as I always am, by telling him about some thinking I've been doing about dashboards.
I've been looking at various dashboards for a little project and the problem with them seems to be that they look like Excel. They're very clear, sensible and readable but the people who are supposed to use them (media, marketingy people) aren't using them as much as they should.
I think it's because they want a dashboard on their screen to make them feel like some sort of Master Of The Universe Trader, or Spy or NASA controller. Their expectations have been set by this. They don't want to feel like an accountant. So maybe they need some more exciting fonts and blinky red buttons - to add the appropriate pretending affordances.
And Max just said - yeah, the pretending layer and moved on. But I was bowled over with the genius of that formulation. Because that's what we need to add to so many things, to give them that extra neccesary magic. A pretending layer. So it's not just a useful or beautiful or functional object - it's got some little nod to who we're pretending to be when we're using it. I've thought a lot about pretending, before. But it's that phrase 'the pretending layer' that really makes it work.
That's the pretending layer. The layer you add when you've solved the important problems, made the thing work properly and seamlessly. It's the extra bit. The things I love the most have a pretending layer, so they're not just for the practical me, they're for the imaginary me.
Anyway. Well done Max.
