Joe Lamantia.com

The recent launches of Ubiq­uity (Mozilla Labs) and Chrome (Google) show how sexy it is to be mod­u­lar on the web, from the user expe­ri­ence [Ubiq­uity], to basic appli­ca­tion archi­tec­ture of the browser [Chrome]. This shouldn’t be a sur­prise to any­one, but it’s not some­thing I hear much about in the user expe­ri­ence com­mu­nity. The frag­men­ta­tion of the web into a ver­i­ta­ble bliz­zard of ser­vices, feeds, wid­gets, and API’s that cre­ate tidal waves of portable and sharable socially rich objects makes think­ing about mod­u­lar­ity indis­pens­able. In all design con­texts.
It’s time the user expe­ri­ence com­mu­nity embraced this way of think­ing, not least because it has excel­lent pedi­gree. Fifty years ago, in his famous talk There’s Plenty of Room At the Bot­tom, physi­cist Richard Fey­man said, “What I want to talk about is the prob­lem of manip­u­lat­ing and con­trol­ling things on a small scale.” His point was sim­ple: think about *all* the lev­els of scale and struc­ture that are part of the world, from very small to very large. Feyn­man wasn’t talk­ing about design­ing ser­vices and expe­ri­ences for the web or the wider realm of inte­grated expe­ri­ences(nice to see the com­mu­nity pick­ing up my ter­mi­nol­ogy…), but his mes­sage still applies. Work­ing, think­ing and design­ing at [sm]all lev­els of scale means doing it mod­u­larly.
The micro­for­mats com­mu­nity has under­stood this mes­sage for a long time, and is very suc­cess­ful at cre­at­ing small, use­ful, mod­u­lar things.
So how are you think­ing mod­u­larly about user experience?