Have you ever turned on the wrong stovetop burner? The same principle makes social media so awful.
When I was eighteen, Donald Norman's book "Psychology Of Everyday Things" changed my life – the title later changed from 'Psychology' to 'Design', but I find the original way better. Because good design has to follow from understanding the user's psychology.
POET puts forward several concepts, including correspondence between controls and controlled. This is the stovetop problem: the burners are arranged in a square, the controls in a line. We're forced to decipher the little hieroglyphic pictographs of the empty and filled circles. Terrible consequences lurk if you're distracted and you fail to interpret correctly.
Physical design has been around as long as humans have been making tools. Yet we still get basics like correspondence wrong. By comparison, software design is a newborn baby of a discipline, not even one century old.
Correspondence of controls and controlled in social software borders on impossible. I can imagine what combination of keys I could press to get my Facebook account locked instantly – a word whose primary meaning is violent followed by a demographic slur would probably do it.
Anything subtler than that, the correspondence between cause and effect blurs. One time I posted some lyrics from a favorite song, expecting my fellow fans to recognize them; but the overwhelming response came from people who didn't recognize, and worse, mis-interpreted.
POET also recommends the principle of immediate feedback. With a gas stove, you know if you turned on the wrong burner. Not so with an electric that takes time to heat up. Without feedback, correspondence can't be recognized.
We keep using social media although we don't really know what the controls do. As if we kept turning the knobs for burners we couldn't see.
And we wonder why the world is on fire.