#media-richness-theory

#media-richness-theory

The convenience of sourcing online is fraught with more pitfalls than most of us want to admit. Try finding adequate photos of a vintage piece's condition-close-ups of the fabric, video of damaged areas, any images of a piece's rear or underside!

Performance is a critical factor in user engagement, where even minor delays in loading can deter users. A clean and simple user interface also contributes significantly to user retention.

AI-synthesized faces are now perceived as more trustworthy than real human faces. Let that sink in for a second: the fake version of reality is more believable than reality itself. Meanwhile, misinformation spreads six times faster than true information on social media. During a crisis, when stress and fear impair our ability to think critically, the information ecosystem becomes a minefield.

Joel Miller opens his new book, The Idea Machine, with this famous scene from The Confessions because it sparked his own epiphany. Not a spiritual conversion, mind. What struck Miller during his recent reread was how Augustine marked his place with his finger. This seemingly unremarkable detail - a move any reader has made countless times - forced Miller to reevaluate books as not simply a vessel for ideas, but as history's most successful "information technology."

Musée d'Orsay hosted an exhibit last year called "Art is in the Street," which cataloged "the spectacular rise of the illustrated poster in Paris during the second half of the 19th century." The prints were lithographs - drawings made on limestone with greasy pencils, which were then exposed to water and inverted onto sheets of paper. Typically, each color got its own stone. The finished product was a firework of oily yellows and reds.

I don't read that much these days. I am lucky now if I read one novel a month. I am ashamed to admit that my current book has been open for six weeks. This isn't me. I am a lifelong devoted reader: the kid who hauled home a bicycle basket full of books from the public library every Saturday, and the teenager who found solace in reading myself into other lives.

Publishers' adoption of generative AI is reducing the friction between content and format, making it easier for the same story to appear as shorter summaries, audio, or video, often in real time. To some publishers, a text article may soon be more of a vehicle for original reporting, not a final product. That information could become no longer available strictly in a static piece of content, but transformed into different shapes and formats, based on a reader's signals and preferences.

In creative, it's speeding up idea generation and enabling production at scale. In media, it's making optimization faster and more predictive, helping us allocate dollars with greater precision. But the limit lies in judgment. AI can process data, but it doesn't know our brand values or the cultural nuance of a message. That's where vision, human creativity, leadership and taste will still be essential.

I want to revisit the age old question about "button placement", to see how UX may have shifted, and how the technology we have now may have changed the way we consume content. And how that, in turn, impacts how buttons and UI elements are placed. If we read from left to right, where should the primary button go: left or right?

We've both fought against needless promotional content before and lamented that frontier AI platforms are falling into the same pattern. As designers and users, we've learned that "free" usually means putting up with interruptive, slightly creepy ads that feel more like a tax than a benefit - a frustration tax that now colors how we approach free‑tier services and now AI tools.