1. Design solves an important human problem

There are millions of design challenges, not every design does or needs to solve an “important human problem”.

2. Design is context specific (it doesn’t follow historical cliches)

Yes, design is contextual, but some contexts benefit from historical references and familiarity for fast and wide adoption, e.g. iPhone intro.

3. Design enhances human ability (without replacing the human)

Some design problems are better solved by getting the human out of the equation; we’re not work animals.

4. Good design works for everyone, everyday

There’s pretty much nothing that “works for everyone, everyday“.

5. Good tech and design is discreet

Being discreet and solving a design problem can be orthogonal.

6. Good design is a platform that grows with needs and opportunities

Not all design needs to be a platform and not all growth is beneficial in the long run.

7. Good design brings about products and services that build long-term relationships (but don’t create emotional dependency)

The driver of manufactured “emotional dependency” isn’t always design; it’s often a business model that requires it, e.g. Facebook, Zynga, Candy Crush, etc.

8. Good technology design learns and predicts human behavior

Algorithms are by definition exclusionary and mostly normative: “learning” and “prediction” aren’t without a price, e.g. aggressive surveillance by Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

9. Good design accelerates new ideas

Not all design requires elaborate contemplation, especially for commodity products.

10. Good design removes complexity from life

Complexity is in the eye of the designer and removal is normative, e.g. Trumpworld.

Incidentally, much of this has nothing to do with “AI” brutally slapped onto the title.

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As we enter the streaming media era, the last of these battles, and undoubtedly the most inane, has ended with a unanimous rejection by a jury in just three hours on Dec 16. The trial had long become a circus act, as have many of the cases involving Apple, notably in the court rooms of Judges Lucy Koh, Denise Cote and Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Indeed, this ended up being a 10-year old class-action case without a single plaintiff! As one law professor put it:

Frankly, I find that flabbergasting, that in a universe of eight million potential plaintiffs, the two that were selected were disqualified. That really tells you a lot about this trial.

About a dozen days prior to this inevitable conclusion, the lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that Apple had deliberately and secretly deleted competitors’ songs from users’ iPods. That’s what the lawyers who couldn’t find two qualified plaintiffs out of eight million prospects said. Here’s what the media reported the next day as fact:

There were dozens and dozens of versions of this ‘fact’ syndicated in a zillion outlets: “Apple had deliberately and secretly deleted competitors’ songs from users’ iPods”.

Of course, it takes exactly two words to rise above click-bait headline framing:

Here’s how Apple’s lead lawyer reacted to it in his closing statement:

There’s not one piece of evidence of a single individual who lost a single song, not even a complaint about it. This is all made up at this point.

This is clearly a simple example, and yet this is how it happens: one story at a time, thousands of times a day, every day. Yes, journalism isn’t exact science, but from epidemiology to space exploration, from technology reporting to business coverage, the sheer amount of fact-free, opinion-framing ‘news’ is now exceeding our collective ability to notice, care or correct. Yes, journalism has always been messy, but the speed with which it’s generated, aggregated and distributed may now be overwhelming us. Yes, we have ever growing access to filtering software to shape our own sphere of coverage, and yet tens of millions of people read, and likely most believed, that Apple had deliberately and secretly deleted competitors’ songs from users’ iPods, an impression which may never be sufficiently corrected. Yes, we’re getting better tools to find and check facts, and yet the incentives to not deceive readers through disingenuous headlining and packaging are clearly not in place. How many headline corrections have you seen in this case?

Paradoxically, in the age of oncoming vertically integrated digital-media companies it may become easier, and certainly faster, to ignore the facts.

Not much changes. Such faux indignation, for the gullible. So few benefits, in the annals.

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Following last week’s Obfuscation by disclosure: a lawyerly design pattern, just a few more points on the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner from WSJ:

1. “[Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts] sits on a presidential jobs council, has hosted President Barack Obama and top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett at his Martha’s Vineyard home and has also golfed with the president.”
2. “Mr. Roberts and his wife, Aileen, have donated $417,290 to Democrats over the past 25 years, compared with $116,150 for Republicans”
3. “[Comcast] one of the most visible players in Washington…spent $18 million on lobbying in 2013, making it the seventh-highest spender overall”
4. “Comcast employees made a total of $6.5 million in campaign contributions during the 2012 election cycle, including $466,000 to the Democratic National Committee and $305,000 to the president’s campaign for re-election”
5. “Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen is a major bundler of contributions for the Democrats, and has hosted a number of prominent fundraisers featuring the president at his home and other venues. Of the almost $870,000 Mr. Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, have donated to campaigns, 79% has gone to Democrats, while just 9% has gone to Republicans.”
6. “Comcast’s lobbying and regulatory team includes Meredith Attwell Baker, a former Republican FCC commissioner who voted in favor of the Comcast-NBC Universal acquisition four months before she joined Comcast.”
7. “One firm representing Comcast is Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, which last year hired former top antitrust official Jon Leibowitz, who served as Mr. Obama’s first chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department.”
8. David Cohen: “we’re not afraid of the government review process. We know it will be stringent. We believe it will be fair and open. All we’re asking for is an opportunity to make our case.”

But what an opportunity! The parties are so sure that this deal will pass through the regulatory charade that Time Warner did not even bother asking for a breakup fee from Comcast should it fail, as is customary in such M&A activity.

Since cable/telecom markets are practically rigged, wouldn’t it be a test of faith to put Comcast’s contention that this deal is “pro-consumer, pro-competitive and strongly in the public interest” to a national referendum? It won’t happen obviously, but a useful mental exercise to remember why big business so loves regulated markets and regulators.

What we have here is a legal document dressed as a press release masquerading as a blog post presented at a corporate website in a section called “ComcastVoices: A Place For Conversations With Comcast”. In other words, it’s lobbying collateral raised to the level of public conversation.

(tl;dr: According to Comcast, the merger is “pro-sumer” if you “get past some of the hysteria,” it’s “approvable” by the regulators and won’t “reduce consumer choice at all”. Will it raise prices? “not promising that they will go down or even that they will increase less rapidly.” Given the historical record of the industry, it’s Comedy Central material.)

Unless you’re in this industry, you’ll likely never read it: it’s 2,480 words. If you’re a civilian and do read it, you won’t understand most of it. It’s not meant for you. How do you know that? If you look at the large introductory banner (above) you get your first design clue: “public interest benefits and undertakings”. It highlights the good stuff: “public,” “interest” and “benefits”. All good. How about “undertakings”? Well, as a promise of potential future positive actions, it sure beats “anti-trust concerns”. Since “public interest benefits and undertakings” is the only part highlighted in color in what’s otherwise an ocean of gray type, you can read this framing statement and be done with it. It perfectly encapsulates the rest: This merger is good for you. Any questions you may have will be taken care of. Thanks for stopping by.

Of course, if you’re really careful, you’ll also notice that it’s bylined by David L. Cohen not just as Executive Vice President (which is what he uses pretty much everywhere else and most notably at the official Comcast Executive Biographies org-chart) but also as Chief Diversity Officer. Yes, “Diversity”. Now you know you’ve really hit on the corporate heavy-gun of choice against discrimination, anti-trust and class warfare charges.

It would be very tempting, at this point, to go into the sausage factory and do a point-by-point walkthrough dealing with the creation of a media/internet/communications colossus that’ll dominate a third of the nation and all the anti-competitive network effects of such consolidation, but that too would be old news. Also, I promised this would be quick, high-level and design oriented.

If you read a lot of contracts or are involved in writing corporate legalese, you already know that it’s important to segregate the good parts from the bad and the mundane, even in those droning tomes set in monospaced fonts like the ubiquitous Times Roman or Courier. Type size, line length, leading, margins, bullets, lists and boldface can subtly lead the reader to pay unequal attention to selected parts. Of course, it’s best when this is done with a delicate touch for maximum surreptitious effect. Like so:

It’s all pro, it’s all good. “Benefits” repeated 4X? Check. Segmented and bulleted? Check. Boldfaced talking points? Check. Inviting? Check. But what about the cons?

Well, we already lost the boldface emphasis and the sound-bite friendly talking points. First comes “certain competitive concerns might be raised.” (“Might be” as if this M&A deal will sail through without any competition/anti-trust questions?) Then comes the yes-but mental priming before we get to deal with “certain competitive concerns”. (Not as memorable as the pro section above, is it?)

But if you really want to lose your audience, you’d best bring out the biggest gun of all: the text-soup with no paragraphs, no segmentation, no bullets, no highlights, no boldface, no nothin’. And dare your readers to read it…forget understanding or recalling any of it.

“Important Information” and “Cautionary Statement”. So “important” and so “cautionary” as to be served as text-soup. Unfortunately, they are not for the “benefit” of the corporation, so glance-and-forget-it.

Am I being naive here? After all, this is a corporation putting its best foot forward, isn’t it? I know. (In another life, I’ve done this for some of the largest corporations in the world.) My point is actually as obvious as it’s depressing: perversely, there is good news in all this. Design works, however evil it may be.

At the bottom of the piece, I also noticed a “You Might Also Like” prompt, like the ones everyone’s accustomed to seeing on blogs and publications to expose the reader to relevant or related content. I’d never “surf” this publication linearly, looking for something to read. But I noticed the photo of George Soros (not identified) seemingly linked to what appeared to be an odd story:

So what happens if you follow this publication’s (what appears to be) editorial recommendation and click on the link to (what appears to be) a tip on a stock about to explode by (who appears to be) George Soros? Well, you end up here:

And what does George Soros (whose photo still unidentified) say about this stock about to explode? Not a single word. The “article” has absolutely nothing to do with Soros, or any other professional investor remotely of his caliber. What is this six-month old “article” that this publication thought “You Might Also Like” about?

Quite simply, it’s a pump and dump, penny stock email scheme…which comes with its own lengthy disclaimer, if you can read it:

Of course, you’ve seen this movie before, in your spam-mail folder. And yet this isn’t some obscure publication written mostly by keyboard slaves over there in some remote country or a ‘news-blog’ sweatshop gearing up to sell itself to a bigger one.

No, this is nothing but household brands: CNN (the once-daring company that changed cable forever) and Fortune (founded by Henry Luce in 1930, four months after the Wall Street Crash of 1929). This is the establishment. The “mainstream” media that is constantly fretting about its loss of stature, impact and financial viability.

You might say, “Hey, what’s the big deal, they’ve got to make money so they’re running some ads!” Another way of saying the same thing is that one day some fine folk at Time Inc. gathered in a conference room and decided that it was acceptable to mislead their readers by disguising penny stock sales brochures as editorially related content. Because, presumably, they need the money.

“But it works!”

Does it, really? If “it works” — meaning Time Inc. online properties intellectually attract and profitably serve the penny stock demographics — can they remain financially solvent news outlets for any length of time? Or are they so financially distressed that they’ll do anything for revenue right now? If this has no adverse effect on news credibility or brand equity, then what’s next? “Native advertising” where an average reader will no longer be able to tell apart news from advertising in the editorial stream? (One 156-year old publication already rented its editorial space to a cult.) Will these advertorial deceptions and misdirections move from the ad wells around the periphery of the page into the news delivery itself? Will there be product placements within news sentences? What follows that? Is the “mainstream media” management about to capitulate on long-held principles because it’s unable or unwilling to pursue any other strategy but the race to the bottom of the advertising barrel? Is there anything more precious than credibility to a news organization? If not, why is Time Inc. poisoning its own well so nonchalantly?

If Google has taught us news is free, Time Inc. is teaching us so is our time.

*

UPDATE: Only hours after this post, The New York Times jumped eyes wide open into the “native advertising” well, as explained in a tortured letter from the Public Editor.

What’s the score?

One of the more ubiquitous writing genres is sports reporting. Countless publications, portals, aggregators and distributors in print, radio, TV and Internet cover team rosters, game previews, schedules, results and all manner of short notices from Little League to college games to professional sports. An army of writers are routinely tasked to generate the base content for this wide spectrum of sports coverage.

Here’s a recent example. Despite having been promoted as championship contenders this year but currently being at the very bottom of the NBA standings, Brooklyn Nets and NY Knicks recently met. The day before the game, as is customary, a “preview” of the upcoming game for general syndication had to be written. Something with a lede like this:

Now remember, there are games in all sports. At all levels. Across the entire world. Every single day. There are also daily and and hourly developments to be covered in finance, weather, healthcare, marketing, real estate, politics, entertainment, transportation, technology and myriad other fields. There’s always been an insatiable demand for expository writing across the board. While domains are very different, to an analytical eye all such data-driven writing share two important traits: they’re very structured and highly automatable. Everything in the game preview above is simple prose, wrapped around stored data, shown in blue here:

It turns out one NBA game preview is pretty much the same as any other similar game. We could structurally separate parts that can be substituted for different data about the other 28 teams and roughly the same compositional logic:

If we can now plug in team-specific names, places and data wherever there’s one of those blue-bracketed placeholders above, we could customize a game preview so specifically to a given event that I’m confident 95% of the reading public couldn’t tell if those sentences were composed by a human writer or an algorithm, like the one I pseudo-reverse-engineered and highly simplified below:

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective and profession, such algorithmic-writing is not some hovering, hyperlooping fantasy. Here’s the actual preview that ran across many sites on the Internet and elsewhere before the game:

And syndicated in one of the biggest such venues, Yahoo Sports:

Who’s your daddy?

See the non-human byline below the headline, Automated Insights? That’s one of the new generation of companies involved in algorithmic writing. There are, and will be, others. For the initiated, the technology is quite straight forward. Often structured data is the gating factor, not compositional technology. Parsing and conditional templating technology is well understood by now. It’s tedious but low-scale pieces could be done with procedural programming, larger ones with rules engines and truly scalable and flexible ones with semantic coupling of the domain specific data.

In fact, many aspects of the writing itself is amenable to conditional embellishment of the parts of speech. For example, in the piece above, we could have pre-programmed a list of synonyms for “struggled” and picked a substitute randomly or one specific to geography, audience or sports. Lexical stylization can indeed get very sophisticated through contextual or randomized algorithms. Management of such conditional logic and metadata at scale has been possible for a couple of decades. When composing a personalized investment report or answering a question on your iPhone, your broker and Siri (though using different technologies underneath) already do something similar.

The advantage

In our example, the day before the game there was another “Knicks-Nets Preview” written by a human, Associated Press basketball writer Brian Mahoney, also syndicated in Yahoo Sports. The two pieces clearly serve different purposes. Mahoney’s article is much longer, as well as being significantly more detailed, colorful and analytical. Automated Insights’s preview is all about brevity, information, timeliness and, ultimately, volume, coverage and cost-effectiveness. In one millionth of the time it takes Mahoney to write one of his NBA previews, Automated Insights can generate previews for all the games not just in NBA but in all sports, anywhere on the planet, as long as there’s underlying data. And in a domain like sports, there’s plenty of data.

The differentiating cost of algorithmic writing is nearly all front-loaded on template and conditional logic programming. When done properly, this can obviate post-production fact checking and proof reading. Once set up, these pieces can be auto-produced when underlying data changes or when schedules are triggered. Thus the marginal cost of iterative articles approaches zero.

The day has arrived

Clearly, programmed robots can in fact write sports previews. And many other types of writing suitable for algorithmic automation. As is the case with the Internet, this will displace a lot of writers and also create concomitant technology jobs elsewhere.

It would be easy to dismiss this as procedural, utilitarian writing that doesn’t share much with literary prose. Granted. But such competition is not the focus of algorithmic writing. Not yet, anyway. Given enough nouns, verbs and associations in a specific knowledge domain, you’d be surprised how close you can come in compositional “believability” even today. Tomorrow, don’t be surprised if your next textbook or travel guide or cookbook is written mostly by domain-specific algorithms. And welcome to the [“brave” | “splendid” | “efficient” | “fearful” | “faceless” | “decimating”] new world of algorithms…eating yet another profession!

You might also be interested in:
Is Siri really Apple’s future? and Can Siri go deaf, mute and blind?

There’s always the good old triple: “good, better, best” a.k.a. “throw-away, can-live-with, must-sell”. Some would go further than three. It’s not uncommon for boutiques to bet on just one solution and try to convince the client. Whether it’s one, three or six, I bet no one has ever heard of 29 options. Unless you work at Yahoo.

A new CEO looking for a quick turnaround getting company logo redesigned? American as apple pie. Some succeed, some fail and most never get more than a week’s worth of traction. Not a big deal, if you just have a press conference, a happy photo-op and your designer gushing over the “how we did it” part in some design pub. (Especially double-delicious if it’s the CEO who’s doing the write-up!) These are as harmless as they are unavoidable.

But 29 days of unrelenting assault on the design sensibilities of the few who cared? Unfruitful. Yahoo’s intention wasn’t crowd-voting or crowd-sourcing its next logotype after 18 years. The crowd couldn’t do anything about the options. So it was a one-way presentation of five horrid letters plus a punctuation mark day after day for a month. And at no point the crowd could cry uncle.

What then is Yahoo telling us?

We don’t care: We think logotype design is a frivolous activity. Since the goal of what it needs to be isn’t quite clear to us, we can post 29 superfluous variations in as many days. Hey, if you challenge us, we could algorithmically generate 365 options in one hour, one day, one year or until you surrender.

We know we should care: We care about logotype design, it represents our brand. We want people to know that we’re changing Yahoo, the company. The crowd can’t yet see the change fully but they can see the logotype change before their eyes. Since the logotype represents our brand which represents our company…well, you get our drift.

More is less: Look, we already had the logotype design we wanted weeks ago. We had interns come up with a few dozen variations and we let you see just 29 of them. You have no idea what the rest looked like. You’re welcome.

We’re not pros at this: We can’t shout from the rooftops. We don’t have ad budgets the size of Samsung’s or even Microsoft’s. Fine, we probably have more web traffic than both combined to expose people to anything we wanted, but we didn’t bother figuring out how we could use that traffic to have them look at what actually matters: who we are and what we want to accomplish as a company. (OK, that would have been dicey because, frankly, we still haven’t figured that out yet.)

See if we care: Yes, we know we could have done things differently. For example, we could have:

• respected the design community and the digerati by serving them something serious for a month so that they could become catalysts to positive conversations about our company on a daily basis. (We may still have to recruit a few of those creative types, after all.)
• tastily presented daily videos and sketches of 29 different designers discussing our logo, brand and company.
• hosted these logotype options at one specific Yahoo property per day (we have dozens of properties) to draw much needed attention to them.
• set up a million-dollar (non-binding) logotype contest (with a nominal $29 entry fee to keep out the riffraff) to attract serious designers and design firms. Cheap.
• video streamed the final selection process, with a few mega-celebs thrown in to attract a crowd and even serve a few ads (or promos for our properties) in the process to boot.
• had the sensibility to not come up with an anemic rehashing of the old logotype, sans serifs but now with bevels (bevels!) like it was the go-go ’90s.

It’s a logotype for crying out loud: Yes, we could have done a lot of different things besides throwing 29 disparate high school lettering projects on the internets for a month to see if anyone cared. But that would have required adult supervision for design and, honestly, we don’t care that much.

Now you know.

*

1. I’d love to see Yahoo succeed, I’ve been using many of their services for years.

2. You might also be interested in “Ordered Information” is not a paint job where we consider the sorry spectacle of Yahoo Finance design.

Above all, despite many examples to the contrary, Google appealed to manifest impartiality: its search results were algorithmically derived, untouched by human biases and thus fair. The list of grandiose promises and statements made by Google that turned out to be false and hypocritical is uncomfortably long. Unfortunately for the rest of us, regulatory capture being what it is and the rare penalties being laughable for a $275 billion company, there isn’t much of a black cloud left over Google to worry about, especially under the current U.S. administration.

So perhaps Google now feels freshly emboldened to tell it like it is. In any case, I was impressed by this frank admission in New York Times:

Even at Google, where algorithms and engineers reign supreme in the company’s business and culture, the human contribution to search results is increasing. Google uses human helpers in two ways. Several months ago, it began presenting summaries of information on the right side of a search page when a user typed in the name of a well-known person or place, like “Barack Obama” or “New York City.” These summaries draw from databases of knowledge like Wikipedia, the C.I.A. World Factbook and Freebase, whose parent company, Metaweb, Google acquired in 2010. These databases are edited by humans.

When Google’s algorithm detects a search term for which this distilled information is available, the search engine is trained to go fetch it rather than merely present links to Web pages.

“There has been a shift in our thinking,” said Scott Huffman, an engineering director in charge of search quality at Google. “A part of our resources are now more human curated.”

Not a shift, but a new admission of on-going reality, I’d say. Let’s hope for Scott Huffman’s sake he ran this by Google legal before it was published. Or better yet, let’s hope Google now stops the unbecoming pretensions to being philosophically open and algorithmically impartial.

• The more successful a product, the harder it’s to upgrade.

• The more users say they want a product update, the more they complain when the change arrives.

It wouldn’t be unkind to ascribe both of them to the iOS platform: spectacularly successful and at the crossroads for the mother of all upgrades for both hardware and software, now commandeered for the first time by a single person who’s not named Steve Jobs. The financial impact of these design decisions is easily the 64-billion dollar question at Cupertino.

What has changed?

Having already sold over 120 million iPads in less than two years, Apple’s now making the sales pitch to hundreds of millions of potential post-PC consumers that iPads may be ‘OR’ devices, not just ‘AND’ adjuncts to their desktops and notebooks of yesteryear.

The iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 created their respective industry segments, then went on to dominate what was mostly virgin territory with a simple proposition: One Device > One Account > One App > One Window.

Several years after their introduction, now with many competitors, Apple is under pressure to examine every link in that chain of platform definition. And the one most contested is the last: One Window. While it’s true that iOS apps can contain two (and sometimes even more) ‘views’ in one screen, like the standard Master-Detail views, two different apps cannot share the same window. A blog writing app on an iPad can, for example, dedicate portions of its single window to video, map, search engine results or tweet displays, but not specifically to Vimeo, Google Maps, Bing or Twitter apps. In the sandboxed territories of iOS, ‘One Device > One Account > One App > One Window’ is still the law of the land.

As iPads move into business, education, healthcare and other vertical markets, however, expectations of what iPads should do beyond audio, video, ebook and simple app consumption have gone up dramatically. After all, users don’t just inertly read in one app at a time but write, code, design, compose, calculate, paint, clip, tweet, and, in general, perform multiple operations in multiple apps to complete a single task in one app.

In iOS, this involves double-clicking the Home button, swiping in the tray to find the other app, waiting for it to (re)load fully, locating the app view necessary to copy, double-clicking the Home button, finding the previous app in the tray and waiting for it to (re)load fully to paste the previously copied material. That’s just one operation between two apps. Composing a patient review for a doctor or creating a presentation for a student can easily involve many such operations among multiple apps.

Indeed, among the major post-iOS mobile platforms like Android, Metro and BlackBerry, iOS is the most cumbersome and slowest at inter-app navigation and task completion. There have been a few mitigating advances: gestural swipes, faster processors and more memory certainly help but the inter-app task sharing problem is becoming increasingly more acute. Unfortunately, solving iOS’s multitasking problem in general involves many other considerations, including introduction of UX complexity and thus considerable user re-education, to say nothing of major architectural OS changes. It may thus take Apple longer than expected to find an optimal solution. What can Apple do in the interim then?

Is ‘Multi’ the opposite of ‘One’?

Systems designers know all too well: when you just don’t have the time, money, staff or technology to solve a given problem, there are ways to cheat. Steve Jobs would be the first to tell you: that’s OK. A well executed cheat can be indistinguishable from a fundamental architectural transition.

From a design perspective, the weakest link in the one-task-many-operations-in-different-apps problem is the iOS clipboard. The single-slot clipboard. The one that forces the user to shuffle laboriously among apps to collect all the disparate items one. at. a. time.

But with a multi-slot clipboard, if you were writing a report, for example, you could go to a web page, copy the URL, a paragraph, maybe a photo and a person’s email address in one trip. Now a single trip back to the initial app and you have four items ready to be pasted into appropriate places with no more inter-app shuffle necessary. Instant 4X productivity gain. Simply put, if you had a four-slot clipboard, you can instantly quadruple your productivity. For a ten-slot clipboard, 10X!

Well, obviously, it’s not that easy. First of all, Apple doesn’t believe in multi-slot clipboards and doesn’t even ship one with Mac OS X. Also, you couldn’t really have an ‘infinite-slot’ clipboard, for iOS would run out of memory quickly. Finally, a multi-slot clipboard would require a visible UI for the user to select the right content, thereby introducing some cognitive complexity.

None of these objections seem insurmountable, though. iOS already has a similarly useful ‘option selectors’ like the recent ‘share sheets’ from which a user can send stuff to Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. Limiting the clipboard to four slots would enable at least 250-pixel square previews of each slot’s contents for easy identification. The Clipboard could pop, move up, slide in from right or perform some other clever animated appearance. Yes, there could be a cognitive penalty for having to be concerned about system-memory management, but a bit of user training for the concept of ‘First In, First Out’ or a little alert to the user indicating memory-intensive copying would go a long way.

It’s not my job to suggest Jony Ive how this might be implemented in UI and UX. But until Apple has a more general solution to multitasking and inter-app navigation, the four-slot clipboard with a visible UI should be announced at WWDC. I believe it would buy Ive another year for a more comprehensive architectural solution, as he’ll likely need it.