I’m all boxed out. It’s as every website I visit nowadays consists of boxes of text and images. Check out GOOD‘s site. Check out CNN. Hell, even Facebook has gotten in some box action, changing profiles to feature more of them.

Even for the company I work, its redesigned website features boxes. In a column on our site, Chris Brogan says that we are emulating Pinterest. That’s not true. We are trying to fit into the flow of how people consume information today.

“…the Web isn’t just an electronic academic journal any more,” Brogan wrote. “It’s visual. It’s bite-sized. It’s a place where we can choose an entry point and dig in.”

I’m in favor of ease. I’m in favor of nice website design. I’m also interested in what it says about society when website designers move toward boxes in their designs.

People overwhelmed with information and wanting categorization reminds me of a study by Laura L. Carstensen, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She published a paper in 2006 titled “The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development” in which she explained that “the subjective sense of a future time plays an essential role in human motivation.”

According to her study, when time is constrained, a person’s motivation priorities focus on emotional states rather than knowledge gathering. Consider this study in design terms–if you know a person has a limited amount of time for browsing, it makes sense to group things together so they can focus only on what interests them. Carstensen showed that people surround themselves with only a small group of friends when time is limited. The same goes with boxes on websites–people want to categorize their interests and friends. (Google+ prefers to use circles instead of boxes, by the way.)

There’s also a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research that says when people feel like they have no control over circumstances they seek boundaries.

“People often turn to aesthetic boundaries in their environment to give them a sense that their world is ordered and structured as opposed to random and chaotic,” the study’s author Keisha Cutright wrote. “When individuals no longer feel in control of  their lives, they seem to seek the sense of order and structure that boundaries provide—the sense that ‘there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place.’”

It’s not surprising then that a lot of websites are using boxes. When all those boxes on all those websites start to pile up, though, it too can become as overwhelming as the information they contain. It’s like when you move into a new place and all your boxes surround you. The choice is to feel suffocated by them or get to work clearing them out so that you can live a free life, one that is fluid and less constrained.

That’s the design trend I’m waiting for someone to unbox.

(Photo via Flickr: Brian Brooks / Creative Commons)

Send to Kindle