memex

“To deliver the full experience, it became clear that we needed to have a new “user contract”. WYSIWYG and direct formatting were great when they arrived in the 80s, but they have trained us all to believe that formatting content is a manual process and every detail must be specified. More challenging for this problem is that people then expect things to stay exactly as they specified, which makes adapting to the device very hard, and makes browsing different designs in a coherent and consistent way nearly impossible. Once you get in the habit of working that way, changing habit and expectation is hard. To give us the flexibility to do automated design and on-the-fly layout for different device sizes, we needed to develop a new user experience where the user could express their intent, rather than specific values or results.”