What are your legacy norms?

Revisiting prior decisions can be tough and effectively doing so often requires you to notice the page margins. Not literal page margins, but like page margins, functionality that exists because the original constraints required it. Page margins exist in word processors because printers have limited ability to reach the edge of the page. Now we’re rarely taking our digital content out of Word/Pages and into a piece of paper, but we continue to open files in that pre-determined shape and edge settings.

I digress. Noticing those page margins, the legacy norms, in your established product is especially important when you’re looking to bring new life into it with an evolution or revolution. I might be the only person that will complain about page margins, but I’ll bet if we looked more closely at how we could present content in word processors without the default margins we might come up with a whole new way to interact with digital documents.

How do you pick up on your legacy norms? I start by naming the assumptions. This can be difficult to do thoroughly sometimes because there just aren’t APIs for all the things that are assumed. Why on earth would I build a property in to set Think about all those videos of parents having their kids tell them how to make a peanut butter sandwich while they smear peanut butter on their hand and then smash the bread because the directions coming from the kid just have things assumed baked into them. We are all those kids, and we have to look at our products like the parents to notice the legacy norms in the form of assumptions.

Watching new users experience your product can be a way to unearth the legacy norms by observing their points of friction, but there’s often poison in the well. If your product was originally designed to be consistent with other pieces of an ecosystem, that benefit also reinforces the legacy norms. To some people, a floppy disk is a 1MB portable storage device; to others, it’s the save icon and nothing more.

Why do we even care about the legacy norms? Well, like I mentioned with how new users experience your product, the legacy norms might be sources of friction on a scale of speed bump to completely blocked. Even for a functionally perfect product, the legacy norms could be opportunities for enhancement. Legacy isn’t meant to have a negative connotation here, standing the test of time shouldn’t be taken for granted. However, there’s a fine line between surviving and continued success.

Post-edit: pageless mode in Google Docs

I’d be remiss to not come back when I got a good chuckle from a dialog introducing me to pageless mode in Google Docs. No matter how normalized a standard becomes, it is still up for evolution.