II · Relationship

Relationship

By now we've established that every element means something. And not only the meaning the designer planned, or what the developer built: what the person makes of it the moment they meet it. That meaning arrives whether we planned it or not.

So now I want to talk about you. Yes, you, reading this.

Think of a product you have a relationship with. Not one you use. One you have something with. Take a second.

Here's mine. It isn't an app. It's the Mac I'm writing this on.

I know when it's choked. I can feel it before anything on the screen says so. I can tell when it's sad and when it's happy, which is a ridiculous thing to say about a machine, and I say it anyway. Once in a while I clean its keyboard. Not because something stopped working. I'm spoiling it a little. It deserves it.

It keeps its side, and its side is long. I press Command and Space, and a small box appears in the middle of the screen, every time, waiting for me to type. My hands learned that years ago and never had to learn it again. My files are where I left them. When I close the lid at night and open it in the morning, everything is there: the same windows, the same half-written sentence. It promises not to crash, and when it crashes anyway, it promises that my work survived, and most of the time it has. It lets me install whatever I want and use it, and if what I want doesn't exist, it lets me build it myself.

None of that is an accident. Apple writes its side down. It publishes guidelines for anyone making things for its screens, a long document that is, underneath, a list of promises to people like me. Command and Z undoes, in every app, and no app should take that key for something else. Settings are always Command and comma away. The menus at the top of the screen start in the same order for every app, so I know where Quit is in a program I opened a minute ago. A button that destroys something looks like it, and asks before it does. If I've asked for larger text, a darker screen or less motion, every app is supposed to listen. But I never read it. I didn't have to. The machine told me itself, in where things sat, in what they looked like, in what happened the first time I pressed them.

Neither of us ever said any of it out loud. That's the whole thing.

A relationship is the promises nobody says out loud.

Between people it's the same. Two parties, both reaching, both making promises that mostly never get said. I'll show up. You'll show up. I'll mean what I say. You'll hear what I meant, not just what I managed to put into words. Nobody signs it. Nobody could list it if you asked. But everyone knows it's there.

It forms without anyone deciding to form it. You don't agree to it; you find yourself in it. And you notice it most on the day it breaks. My mouse charges through a port on its belly, so when the battery dies, it lies on its back with a cable in it, and I can't use it until it's done. Nobody told me that was the deal. Or the morning after an update, when the settings I'd known for years had been rearranged overnight, renamed and moved, and I stood in my own house looking for the light switch. Nothing was ever promised, and still something was broken.

That's what this part is about. Once a thing means something to someone, there are two of them: the thing that said something, and a person who now expects something because of it. The question changes. Not what does this mean? anymore. What does it owe me?

A product doesn't get to choose whether it's in a relationship with the people who use it. Only whether it's a good one.

One more thing, before we go on, and I'd rather be upfront about it. This part uses the word relationship for two different things, and I couldn't find a better word for the second.

One is what I've been talking about: between a product and the person using it. The other is between the elements on the screen themselves. What belongs with what. What sits close and what's kept apart. Which thing leads, and which follows. A label and its field are in a relationship. So are the rows of a list, and so is the gap between two groups that tells you they aren't one.

The relationships between the elements serve the one with the person. They make the promises clear. They give each element its context, so it means what it should, and they make the promises easier to keep.

Think of you and someone you're close to. There's what you have between you. And there are the smaller things you feel it through: how close you sit, the small acts of care, listening without trying to fix anything. On a screen, those smaller things are the relationships between the elements: the label that sits right by its field, the button that stands next to the row it acts on, the gap that says these two aren't one.

I'll try to be clear. And forgive me if I overuse the word. I fall for relationships easily.