Coffee, and the Note I Never Went Back To

There was a sign behind the counter with a typeface on it I could not place. Something condensed, with a slightly wrong g, the kind of wrong that means a person drew it rather than licensed it.

I did what everybody does. I took a photo.

Then I sat down with the coffee and watched myself do the next thing, which was nothing. That was the entire interaction. The photo is now in a camera roll with about eleven thousand others, in perfect chronological order, indexed by date, location, and whether it contains a dog.

I will not see it again.

Not because it is lost. It is preserved beautifully, backed up twice, synced across three devices, and findable in under a second by anyone who knows to look. I will not see it again because nothing will ever bring it back to me, and I will never think to go looking.

Fig. 1. Notes left on a wall in a coffee shop. Visible, unsorted, unsearchable, and read constantly. Photograph by UndueMarmot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The asymmetry, stated plainly

Capture cost me about two seconds and zero decisions. That is a genuine achievement of design and it is now completely free.

Retrieval requires me to remember that I once photographed a sign in a café, remember roughly when, and care enough at some later moment to go and dig for it. That is not two seconds. That is a small project, undertaken on speculation.

Table 2. Both halves of the same transaction. Only one of them was optimised.

So the cost curve is inverted. The system made the cheap half free and left the expensive half exactly where it was. And because the cheap half feels so good, the shutter sound, the little animation, the sense of having done something about it, we mostly fail to notice that the transaction was never completed.

The photograph was not a way of keeping the sign. It was a way of stopping thinking about the sign.

That is uncomfortable, and I think it is frequently true. Capture is, among other things, a device for discharging an obligation. You saw something, it made a small demand on your attention, and the gesture converts that demand into a file. The demand goes away. Whether the file is ever useful is a separate question that the gesture does not ask.

The wall of notes, which works

Here is what bothers me about my own conclusion. On the wall of the same café there were a few hundred handwritten notes, stuck up by customers over what looked like years. No index. No search. No dates. No organisation of any kind.

And people read them constantly. I watched three separate people stand and read that wall while I was there.

The wall has one property my camera roll does not: it is visible without being asked for. You do not retrieve from it. You encounter it, because it is where you already are.

That is not a minor difference. It is the difference. The research on this is fairly unforgiving: in the only controlled study I have found on whether people return to things they deliberately saved, Ofer Bergman, Steve Whittaker and Joel Schooler found that of 250 bookmarked targets, 41 were retrieved via the bookmark, and 32 of those 41 came from a bookmark visible in the browser bar rather than from navigating the saved hierarchy. Visibility did the work. Filing did almost none of it.

What I am refusing to build

The obvious move, and the one every product in this space eventually makes, is a trigger. Surface the thing later. Resurface it. Serve a "one year ago today."

I am not building it, and I want the reason written down now while I still believe it, because I expect to be tempted.

A reminder solves the problem by making the product interrupt you. It converts a retrieval failure into an attention tax, and it does work, in the sense that you do see the thing again. But you see it on the system's schedule, not at the moment you needed it. The moment I needed that typeface was about six weeks later, in a completely unrelated piece of work, when I was reaching for exactly that kind of condensed wrongness. No notification cadence would have hit that. A daily resurfacing would have shown me eleven thousand things and been wrong about ten thousand nine hundred and ninety nine of them.

So the honest position is: I do not know. I have decided I am not allowed to invent a solution to a failure I have not yet experienced inside the product I am building. Design from an imagined failure produces features that solve an imagined problem elegantly, which is most of what ships.

The thing I took from the coffee

Two sentences, and one of them is not mine.

Zero-effort capture with high-effort recall is not a convenience. It is a debt.

And visibility, not storage, is what gets paid back. The café wall is not a better archive than my camera roll. It is a worse archive that happens to be in the room.

Sources

• A wall of notes left in a coffee shop. Photograph by UndueMarmot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dash_Coffee_at_Gate_1_Dasma_-_Interior_-_Post-it_notes_wall_2.jpg

• Bergman, O., Whittaker, S., & Schooler, J. (2021). Out of sight and out of mind: Bookmarks are created but not used. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 53(2), 338-348. DOI 10.1177/0961000620949652

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