9. Back Pocket Apps: This app goes perfectly with my skinny jeans

Embrace typical processes instead of screens. That’s the first principle of NoUI. It sounds straightforward. However, screen-based thinking has become so deeply entrenched into our culture that the interface inundation has even led to unexpected psychological outcomes. But fear not—smart designers and engineers are working on variants of apps—yes, apps—that embrace our typical processes. Apps that can live in your back pocket.

A few years ago, a doctor by the name of Michael Rothberg reached out to a colleague with a request. He was confident that something medically undocumented had happened to him. Disturbed, yet curious, Dr. Rothberg told his friend Dr. Ashish Arora about his psychological event, and the two decided to design a survey for the medical staff at Baystate Medical Center, an acute care hospital in western Massachusetts, to locally measure the occurrence rate. Participation in the survey was unexpectedly high, and the results were astounding:¹ About 68 percent of the participants had exactly the same experience as Dr. Rothberg.²

Later, a nearly identical study in Indiana—conducted by a different group of researchers—attempted to measure the same phenomena with 290 undergraduate students.³ The outcome? This time, 90 percent had experienced the same event as Dr. Rothberg. And it happened to those participants, on average, once every two weeks.⁴

I think that’s you.
No, it’s you.
Are you sure?
I think so.
Maybe it’s Jane. Jane is that you?
Oh, yeah, I think. Wait, no.
Frank?

Ringxiety.⁵ Also known as phantom vibration syndrome (PVS). The twenty-first-century technological adaptation of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” that plagued Dr. Rothberg . . . and still plagues almost all of us. Pager, smartphone, or smartwatch.

I’m on silent.
I thought I was.

An imagined ringtone that makes you want to scream some 1843 Edgar Allan Poe in the middle of a movie theater when your phone isn’t even buzzing:⁶

Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no, no! They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!⁷

Over 300 years before that Poe passage was written,⁸ Leonardo da Vinci filled his encrypted notebooks with findings of everyday life and visions for the future. One of his passages—amongst sketches of flying machines and anatomical drawings of the human form⁹—was an unusual discovery about walls.

In the stains, paint chips, and various stones that made up the walls of his day, he saw something different. “Mountains, rivers . . . figures in quick movement,” he wrote. “With such walls and blends of different stones it comes about as it does with the sound of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and word that you can imagine.”¹⁰

Leonardo may have been one of the first to record¹¹ a visual and auditory form of the psychological state apophenia—an error in perception—called pareidolia. It’s a form of pattern recognition encoded in us for survival gone haywire, where a false stimulus (like a sound, vibration, or image) is perceived as authentic.¹² Leonardo visually experienced it through stains on the wall. Edgar Allan Poe’s character experienced it through sound after a murder.¹³ It’s how a Rorschach inkblot test works. And it’s what Dr. Rothberg experienced when he heard phantom vibrations from his smartphone.

“In the case of phantom vibrations, because the brain is anticipating a call, it misinterprets sensory input according to this preconceived hypothesis. The actual stimulus is unknown, but candidate sensations might include pressure from clothing, muscle contractions, or other sensory stimuli,” reported the study by Dr. Rothberg and Dr. Arora.

For us, the well-oiled machine of notifications hosted within smartphone platforms such as iOS or Android can be an unrelenting flood of app companies trying to use notifications to draw us to their interfaces. On a special day, like your birthday, it can be an endless stream of “Happy birthday!” notifications from services like Facebook, which by default reminds everyone to remind you it’s your birthday. Even on a normal day, some of the more active users on Quora have reported receiving 150 to 500 notifications per day from all the applications on their phones.¹⁴ Even though we can silence our phones and turn off notifications, an incredible number of us have become so accustomed to the inundation and so paranoid we’ll miss an actual important event that we have hallucinations of buzzes and beeps when they don’t even happen.

Do you see a ringtone?

Your smartphone is begging you.

Activated by screen-based applications, addictive business models, and the structure of mobile operating systems, our smartphones crave to be outside our pockets and purses. You have more friends on Facebook than you think. People have been looking at your LinkedIn profile. Every ding, vibration, and ring is your smartphone screaming and begging: LET ME OUT! A day with our smartphones looks like this:

Unplug your smartphone from the charger, put in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
and plug it in to charge while you sleep.

As you read it, the same phrase repeated fifteen times may have felt redundantly silly; but Locket, a small New York City–based startup that makes a custom lock screen experience for Android, found that their roughly 150,000 users check their phones much more often.¹⁵

One hundred and ten times a day, in fact.

Unplug your smartphone from the charger, put in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
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pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
and plug it in to charge while you sleep.

However, not everyone agrees with those usage numbers. The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), which has backed Amazon, AOL, Intuit, Google, and a lot of other companies you might know,¹⁶ would disagree with Locket. According to KPCB research, we actually tend to check our phones more often.¹⁷

One hundred and fifty times a day, in fact.

Unplug your smartphone from the charger, put in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
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pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
pull it out to use the interface for a moment, put the phone back in your pocket or purse,
and plug it in to charge while you sleep.

Your phone isn’t just begging for attention a lot, it’s begging “LET ME OUT!” every waking day. In an international poll taken by Time magazine, 1 in 4 people check their phone “every 30 minutes, 1 in 5 people every 10 minutes.”¹⁸

Be careful not to rip the pocket of those skinny jeans.

But now, you’ve inadvertently downloaded the “Spiderman app.” Don’t worry, dropping your phone is common—popular even. According to the Washington Post, it’s cool amongst suburban teens in Washington, DC. A sort of “subversive” trend, like a scar on your knee from a motorcycle accident. And if you know someone who hasn’t been lucky enough to drop her phone into the “cat’s water bowl,” fear not. You can download literally hundreds of shattered glass wallpapers for free (or even purchase) to decorate the background of your smartphone to fit in.¹⁹

Just look at them. They’re beautiful, really. Metal accented buttons. Lightweight and thin. Cutting-edge industrial design, manufactured with microprecision by specialized robots, and hand assembled in Chinese factories. But once the little gadget rears its head in the real world, and those notification wishes of your attention are finally fulfilled, the smartphone functions terribly as an everyday object in our hands. It’s fragile, and even the most minor, everyday damage can be difficult to repair.

Don’t drop it. Don’t get it too wet. Oh, you touched it with sweaty hands?²⁰ Sorry, your warranty doesn’t apply anymore.²¹

A recent survey found that 23 percent of all iPhone owners have a broken screen.²² This is remarkable considering people in the United Kingdom and the United States tend to replace their smartphones every twenty-two months.²³

Gadget blogs recommend smartphones because the metallic materials feel good in your hand, but then mention, oh yeah, “the phones are prone to scratches,” so if you want it to last, “a case will resolve all of these issues.”²⁴

Wait, if you recommend a case that covers the materials of the phone, why are we talking about the materials of the phone?

Even some at the New York Times have drunk the Kool-Aid without critical thought. Why not buy a case? “Why pay hundreds of dollars for a phone and not spend a little bit more to protect it?”²⁵

It’s something the car industry has completely missed.

Now, this top-of-the-line model is really what you should buy. Oh, and if you’re one of those people who goes to the gym, you’ll want to buy this $5,000 case to prevent your sweat from utterly destroying your car . . .

Why has the fragility and water vulnerability of smartphones become commonplace and accepted? We know glass and metal don’t do well in our cement cities. We know we sweat. Drop our phones. That it rains. Eighty-seven percent of all iPhone users have a case. Sixty-six percent of all Android users do.²⁶ To me, those case usage rates are a sign of failure in user experience design. A failure to embrace typical processes.

As smartphone manufacturers continue to spend millions in research to make phones thinner and thinner and lighter and lighter, and attempt to further and further reduce the absolutely-not-cumbersome edges around the screen in order to give gadget blogs something to drool over, most people just throw an ugly rubber case on them and don’t even notice.

Then there’s battery life. The Facebook group “I hate ‘battery low’” has nearly 400,000 likes for a reason.²⁷

The more mobile, the more connected we are to devices, the more and more important battery life becomes. Even in our most mobile place, an airport, we still don’t have the resources in place to accommodate our devices’ power needs. We huddle in corners and sit on the floor near bathrooms. The need to keep our devices charged has become a burden.

Don’t worry, the New York Post has lent some advice: “If you frequently use your smartphone or tablet to do business while you’re out of the office, it can be hard to sense exactly how much longer you’ll be able to work before your battery dies and you need to recharge.”²⁸

True. Their solution?

“Battery Doctor is a mobile app that will tell you the amount of power and time left on your current battery. It will also give you suggestions on how to get more juice both when you need it now and in the future.”

Oh, how I love screen-based thinking. So, in order to solve my battery problem, I’m supposed to launch another app to run on my battery-draining screen?

As mainstream phones keep getting bigger and bigger, it’s harder and harder to even squeeze them in and out of your front pocket. Some thinner models made with aluminum can even bend with a little force.²⁹

So I say, forget it. Stop taking your phone out of your pocket.

And no, I’m not saying, “If you don’t have one already, go out and grab a smartwatch with an operating system designed around scrolling through annoying notifications on an ultratiny screen while your phone stays in your pocket.”

Buzz.

Was that you?
I dunno, I thought so, but I think
I’ve ripped off all my arm hairs scrolling
through every notification ever.

I say, put your smartphone away, forget that notification-minded smartwatch for a moment, and let technology completely fade into the background.

Sure, there are extreme ways of doing this. A designer at a technology conference once described to me his twenty-first-century vacation from the cries of his smartphone with wild-eyed enthusiasm.

“Then, when you arrive, you toss your smartphones into a bucket . . . Your name, it’s like, whatever you want it to be. . . . You can’t talk about everyday stuff like work. There are no clocks on the wall. No watches. Watches are forbidden. . . . It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

I’ve never been to the “summer camp for adults where grown-ups go to unplug, get away, and be kids again,”³⁰ that he was describing to me, so I can’t guarantee that this designer, let’s call him Craig, wasn’t exaggerating when he told me about his latest grand adventure—but the annual cellphone-free event is real. Camp Grounded, run by Digital Detox, provided Craig with a getaway from tech to remember what it was like to live without hashtags and with human contact—bond, share, and have fun with roughly two hundred adults in the wilderness.

Craig was glowing from having paid money for someone to take away his technology. Take away his notifications. Take away his ringtone. Take away his phantom vibrations.

Yes, an adult summer camp in the wilderness does sound incredible, and breaking away from any addiction is a good thing; but we’re not going to—and we shouldn’t—toss our phones into a pile, douse them with gasoline, and watch their microchips melt. That’s reacting to symptoms, not preventing the causes.

There’s an alternate path. One that allows us to keep our phones in our pockets, that doesn’t shun technology, that doesn’t just push notifications onto our wrists. One that embraces the power of computing while pushing it forward to do something better. A few of the brightest in tech have already begun working on it.

In early 2013, a startup called ProtoGeo released a smartphone app called Moves.³¹ It was created to track your movement and record your aerobic activity, such as the number of steps you take each day.

Frankly, even at its release, the concept of tracking your movement wasn’t that interesting. Cheap pedometers have been available for decades. Highly accurate GPS sport watches have been available for years. And smartphones already had hundreds of exercise-related apps.

But the Moves app had something different that stood out to me upon launch. Something wonderfully expressed in, of all places, its original app icon.^* Something that I believe should be the starting point for more innovators in technology:

* Moves has been acquired by Facebook, and altered this original app icon.

This app is designed for your pocket.

Unlike the buzzing and beeping of other apps begging you to play with them, this app, well, it likes your pocket. It lives there. It wants to be hidden. And it needs no additional electronic accessories.

It is a different way to approach a mobile experience and a fantastic design constraint. Here’s how the app (still available) works: You do your typical thing. You walk. Run if you desire. Cycle if you must. While the phone sits in your pocket, it uses a few of your smartphone’s sensors to collect information about how you move. No extra wearables to wear. The app just works in the background, using the phone’s battery as little as possible.

As Rachel Metz said in the MIT Technology Review when it was released, “I’m convinced its simplicity represents the future of self-tracking.”

It’s a beautiful starting point to embrace our typical processes, but the Moves app falls short on the No Interface yardstick. The only thing it really does with all that wonderful data is dump it into a big old graphical user interface, leaving you searching through lists and dashboards for something meaningful.

We can go further. We can solve problems with our phones in our pockets.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a British insurance company survey found that the average adult in the United Kingdom “misplaces nine items a day,” that a third of respondents spend fifteen minutes a day trying to find lost items,³² and that people are “most frustrated at losing their house keys.”³³

Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt wanted to help us losers. Funded by Y Combinator³⁴—a Silicon Valley organization that provides funding and resources to help founders get their ideas off the ground—the duo created the first generation of Lockitron, a deadbolt that connects to your smartphone. Wired raved on its release, “Unlock Your Home with Your Cellphone.”

While it sounded exciting, the solution required a special deadbolt replacement (good luck getting Frank to install that), and then asked an everyday action to drown in more cumbersome, phone-and-screen-based thinking that was no better than the old lock and key.³⁵

1. Walk up to my apartment door.
2. Pull out my smartphone.
3. Wake up my phone.
4. Slide to unlock.
5. Enter my passcode.
6. Exit my last opened app.
7. Exit my last opened group.
8. Swipe through a sea of icons, searching for the app.
9. Tap the app icon.
10. Wait for the app to load.

11. Tap the unlock button.

12. Physically open my apartment door.

A year later, the Lockitron team redesigned their product, not by hiring a shallow-minded industrial designer to make the object shiner or a marketing team to make a stylish but incremental UI shift. Nope, they created a refreshingly new and more useful UX.

The first major change was to their custom deadbolt. They got rid of it. Instead, they made a cover that goes over your existing lock. No need for a new set of door keys.

More impressively, they also thought beyond screens, and eliminated the need for you to remove your phone from your pocket.

You still need to download and install their app on your smartphone, but once you set up the app, your smartphone can remain in its rightful place as a rectangular bump in your jeans. Using Bluetooth technology, the second-generation Lockitron app enabled your phone to talk to your deadbolt without an explicit digital interaction.^* So when you’re at your own door, Lockitron lets you in and welcomes you home without any need for you to even wake up your smartphone. Their app didn’t thrive off PVS or addiction—it created customer satisfaction by keeping your smartphone in your pocket.

* The first Lockitron did have near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, but unfortunately the market share for NFC was nearly nonexistent at the time.

This second-generation Lockitron raised $2.2 million on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter from potential customers.³⁶ An impressive amount for a door lock.

There are lessons to be learned from Lockitron’s approach to its second- generation product. If we embrace our typical processes instead of graphic user interfaces, we can start to discover elegant solutions. All it takes is a little observation, empathy, and understanding.

Sadly, it seems like we are far from kicking the habit.

Self-checkout machines are perceived as a potential big win for numbers-friendly, short-term, “Slap an interface on it!” –minded execs. They use touchscreen graphical user interfaces to shift work from store employees to customers like you. It’s a strategy that sounds so alluring—reducing line lengths and labor costs—that the number of self-checkout lanes is expected to continue to increase, and the variety of businesses that install them is expected to grow.³⁷ You’ve probably seen self-checkout lanes at superstores like Walmart, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Safeway.

But something unexpected has coincided with the rising popularity of these machines. It’s gotten so bad that a number of chains have decided to close their self-checkout lanes and end their experiments immediately. The stores are losing money because self-checkout lane shoppers are regularly shoplifting.

ABC News, who reported on this “supermarket crime wave,” reported estimates that theft at self-service lanes costs the typical American household over $400 a year (cost of stolen goods passed on to other customers). And that theft was “five times more likely” at self-checkout lanes than human-operated ones. Supermarkets Albertsons and Big Y have considered removing the machines.³⁸

Maybe standing at the self-checkout lane causes us to instantaneously lose our moral compass. Maybe something about the screens makes us start inexplicably entering gourmet coffee beans as bananas into the self-checkout machine just to save two dollars.

But I think something entirely different is actually happening. Just ask Chris Matyszczyk, who wrote this for CNET:

“There’s no line, so you figure you’ll try it. You put your shopping basket down, then you begin to scan the items. That part generally works fine. But then there’s the bananas. How much do they weigh? How much are they per pound? Which button are you supposed to press?”³⁹

The small increase in theft that correlates with self-checkout machines is probably because we’re lost. We sometimes have no idea what we’re doing. No matter what your cat appears to be doing on your iPad, touchscreen interfaces are not inherently intuitive.

The BBC reported that “48% of Britons think self-service checkouts are a nightmare, neither quick nor convenient.”⁴⁰ In another study, nearly 60 percent of those in the United Kingdom who stole something from a supermarket did so because they “gave up trying to scan something that wouldn’t register”⁴¹ (the top reason theft occurs, according to that study).

In the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart “discovered after increasing the number of self-checkout systems across its more than 4,000 U.S. stores that longer lines began forming at its staffed checkouts to deal with customers with more complicated and time-consuming transactions, such as shoppers who used coupons and price matching.”⁴²

As Farhad Manjoo once said, “the human supermarket checker is superior to the self-checkout machine in almost every way. The human is faster. The human has a more pleasing, less buggy interface. The human doesn’t expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn’t on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper.”⁴³

And it’s not just happening for checkout lanes. UIs are even appearing at places where we order food, like Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, and Applebee’s. Instead of people, customers are dealing with unintuitive, tedious, slow, and sometimes frustrating digital interfaces; and occasionally they’re committing petty theft by accidentally tapping that they’re adding a small bag of chips when they actually grab a jumbo gulp.

When McDonald’s, for example, started seeing their sales slide in 2014, industry experts advised that the fast food giant focus on “food and branding.”⁴⁴ What did they do instead? They installed touchscreens to attract younger customers. Joel Cohen, president of the Cohen Restaurant Marketing Group in Raleigh, North Carolina, said in response, “I’m just wondering if they’re forgetting about their strengths, which are speed and convenience.”⁴⁵

What if, instead, we followed the first principle of No Interface? What if we understood our typical processes around payment and avoided using an interface?

This was the promise of Square’s Wallet.

With the Square experiment, when you were within fifty meters of a store, your name and picture showed up on the cash register without you having to wake up your phone, or even open the Square app. When you activated their Pay with Square Auto Tab feature for a particular restaurant ahead of time, a low-energy Bluetooth technology signature from your phone allowed your Square account information to automatically pop up on the store’s certified register application.

So did your order history. And since it started working within fifty feet, this actually allowed cafés to delight frequent customers by preparing a typically ordered item before they even walked up to the counter. When you picked up your desired item, your receipt was emailed to you instantly.

In the words of Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square,

“The customer can walk in the store, and the merchant actually gets a notification that the customer is in the store and that [he] had a cappuccino last time. So I can actually start making the cappuccino and say, ‘Here David, here’s your cappuccino,’ and then it’s done. It’s super simple. And that’s what builds loyalty. That’s what keeps people coming back. . . . We see it with Starbucks. You go to the same Starbucks again and again, they know your name, they greet you with a smile, they know your order, it’s amazing.”⁴⁶

You wouldn’t use the Auto Tab feature for everywhere, obviously. But at the places you frequent and trust, it could be a wonderfully elegant transaction that embraces your everyday habits.

Square’s back pocket app allowed for faster and better service without costly and unintuitive self-checkout machines, asking you to pull out your credit card, or even forcing you to yank your phone out of your skinny jeans.

MasterCard’s PayPass (launched in 2003)⁴⁷ requires you to pull out an object (credit card or key fob) and wave it at a special terminal to pay; JPMorgan Chase’s Blink system (launched in 2005)⁴⁸ requires you to pull out their credit card and wave it at a terminal; American Express’s ExpressPay line of cards (launched in 2005)⁴⁹ requires you to pull them out and wave them at a terminal; Visa’s payWave (launched in 2007)⁵⁰ requires you to pull out an object (credit card or key fob) and wave it at a terminal; Google Wallet (launched in 2011)⁵¹ requires you to pull out your phone and wave it at a terminal; Apple Pay (launched in 2014) requires you to pull out your phone and wave it at a terminal.

All of them are missing a higher standard in experience design.

To be fair, Square’s technology does require some UI through their Wallet app to initially set up on the customer’s smartphone. It also requires UI on the cashier’s end to authenticate the order. But after the initial setup the customer doesn’t have to deal with an interface—or even a wallet—just to order a latte.

As businesses figure out how to take advantage of the latest in tech, they often turn to slap an interface on it! as the answer but actually end up with worse customer experiences and costly mistakes. Although some news media outlets said grocer-chain Albertsons’ decision to drop their touchscreen menu-happy self-checkout lanes was because of theft, the store went to the press to say they actually just wanted to bring back a better customer service experience. “We just want the opportunity to talk to customers more,” a spokeswoman said about the move to drop their self-checkout interfaces. “That’s the driving motivation.”⁵²

The same goes for Square Auto Tab. In the words of Wired, “the appeal was all about increasing human contact. By taking all the bits of paper, bills, and cruddy pieces of plastic out of the equation, a commercial transaction became more of a pure human interaction.”⁵³

As a startup trying to disrupt a global payments system, Square’s Auto Tab provided magical experiences at small, locally-owned cafés, but to the remorse of its delighted loyal following and deep-pocketed investors, it struggled with the huge burden of mainstream adoption of its seamless Wallet app technology.^*

* Square has declared it will take “everything we learned from Wallet” into apps like Square Order, a takeout ordering app.

That struggle might be because it embraced typical processes for consumers but not for businesses. This enormous undertaking—to educate enough cafés to understand the full power of their elegant system—proved too much for a small company. Even their biggest partnership—one to enable Square Wallet at Starbucks across the US—wasn’t favorable for Square financially,⁵⁴ Starbucks employees weren’t introduced to the system,⁵⁵ and worse, it never included Auto Tab. So with its biggest partner, on its biggest stage, Square Wallet was just another app at Starbucks that required you to pull out your phone, wake it up, find the app, launch it, and push a button to get a barcode that then had to be scanned.

(Shiver). Please, let’s keep those phones in our pockets whenever possible.

Auto Tab remains an important moment in the history of computing because it started scratching the surface for something greater in experience design. Something extraordinary happens when we start imagining screenless solutions. And what’s wild is that these solutions are starting to become possible by keeping your smartphone in your pocket.

It’s time to rethink our approach. Our smartphones are powerful computing devices capable of elegant solutions far beyond notifications and shallow pinches and zooms. We can start by avoiding screens and embracing our typical processes.

Let’s continue with a closer look at one of the most accepted practices in creating new technology today: wireframes.