Learning the Desk Through Its Objects
The objects explain the actions.
By Patrick Amihood, Creator of Postmello ·
On the Postmello desk, the place to begin a letter is a stack of paper.
That sounds like a decision about appearance. It also decides where someone looks, what action seems possible, and what should happen next. Touching the paper should give you paper. A drawer should open onto the things it holds. A mailbox should contain letters.
I wanted those expectations to do useful work.
Most of us have spent years learning the visual vocabulary of software. We recognize a compose icon, a toolbar, a navigation tab and a menu even when the symbols bear little resemblance to what happens after we touch them. That familiarity is earned through repetition. It is easy to forget how much of it we learned.
Postmello offered an opportunity to begin with a smaller vocabulary, organized around the act of correspondence.
The paper stack starts a letter. Address labels place friends on an envelope. A stamp completes the preparation. The outgoing box accepts the finished letter. Each friend's drawer holds correspondence to return to later.
These objects give actions both a place and a consequence. Instead of remembering which screen contains a feature, someone learns where an object belongs and what it does.
The difficulty is that a convincing picture is only the beginning. If a drawer looks easy to grab but only a tiny part responds, the object has failed. If dropping an envelope starts an unexplained wait, the scene has become confusing precisely where it should be most understandable.
So the behavior has to support the appearance. The area that responds to a touch needs to be generous. An object must move and settle in a way that makes its new state clear. Dragging should have a working tap alternative, so an expressive gesture never becomes the only way through.
Watching people use the desk helped separate familiar-looking objects from understandable interactions. Sometimes the object itself was enough. Sometimes the response needed to become clearer. The useful question was what someone expected after touching it, and whether the desk fulfilled that expectation.
The result still contains controls. There are tools for writing, trays for choosing things, and places where a tap performs an action. The design choice is to keep those actions close to the material being worked on, rather than surround the desk with a permanent frame of app navigation.
The Admin Portal uses conventional iOS screens. Setting permissions, managing an account and reviewing a problem benefit from explicit lists and controls. The Key marks the passage into that different kind of work. Reporting a troubling letter also deserves a clear intervention, even when it interrupts the illusion.
For writing and receiving, though, the objects let the desk remain a coherent place. Learning one interaction helps explain another. Paper stays paper through choosing, writing and putting it aside; the envelope remains the thing being prepared through addressing and stamping.
That coherence is what interests me about skeuomorphic design. The materials give the space its warmth. Their behavior gives someone a reason to trust the next touch.