The Role of Texture in User Experience
In this age of socially-constructed media, how does one survive the chicken and the egg problem of reaching critical mass? Michal Migurski offers a potential solution: greebles.
I had another post all lined up for today and then my delicious feed alerted me to a recent presentation on surface by Michal Migurski: Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles, and Flair. I thought the last section was such a good read, I just had to share it and offer some comments.
Greebles are a great little design trope that is not widely known outside modeling circles. In my earlier 3D modeling days, I used to play with them quite a bit. Sci-fi aficionados will recognize greebles as the texture that covers the Death Star, Star Destroyer, and Borg Cube.
Migurski describes them thusly:
Greebles are the parts that “look cool, but don’t actually do anything”. There’s an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture.
Migurski’s thesis is that while greebles themselves don’t do anything, they do serve a purpose. They are the “slight of hand” that suggests complexity and activity—which can be very important to an audience’s impressions of an experience. For example, the experience of social networking.
His presentation notes contain a number of insightful observations ((emphasis mine)):
Surface details … are a kind of social signal that the textured surface is real and cared-for….
Social sites are taken seriously when they have crowds of users, loads of data, and all the scaling problems that accompany success.
((Does this mean service outages and shortages are legitimizing agents? — probably so.))
Credibility comes from looking busy, and being continuous: having something on page two, page three, etc.
((Agreed.))
And the cream of the crop:
Compare and contrast the visual appearance of OpenStreetMap two years ago vs. now: it’s more credible and therefore more useful, because it’s beautiful.
Discussion
So texture is aesthetically-pleasing complexity, which serves as a cue that we should pay heed to something. I think this is a great abstraction for describing the aforementioned chicken and the egg question of social media: How does one obtain texture?
Assuming the technique works (which I think it does), is it ethical to deploy greebles, which are ostensibly generated noise? Or is texture best developed organically, through social use? Greebles are certainly easier, but are they healthier for the system? Something to ponder…
Regardless, Migurski is onto something: texture is an essential part of user experience. Without it the Death Star would just be a humble sphere, the Star Destroyer a wedge, and a Borg Cube would be…well… a cube.
As purveyors of simplicity, it’s interesting to consider those instances where complexity (of some kind) may be absolutely necessary.
Comments on this post
1.
Thank you for the kind words! The ethics question is … scary. I was asked a question at the end of the talk by my friend Darren about the difference between the Kosmoninki map, whose greebles represent real buildings, and the fictional examples whose surfaces don’t. I think I fumbled an answer about how they were both intended to have the same effect, but Tom Carden later said that he thought a better way to think about it is that the greebles on the Star Destroyer are there to suggest the reality that the Moscow map truly reflects.