Going Virtual: Why you should ditch Skeuomorphisms (but how IMEX got it almost right)

(Full disclosure: I work for a company that builds virtual events. We do not use skeuomorphisms.)

So here we are. It is 2020, and what seemed to be a great year for in-person meetings has become an unimaginable effort, on one hand, to keep our businesses and clients afloat, and, on the other hand, 2020 will become the year we all went remote and virtual.

I am struggling, you are struggling, our clients are struggling, everyone is in a panic to understand how we will take our next meeting, our next conference, our next tradeshow remote. It doesn't even matter when they are happening, the question has overrun most of us. Without wanting to be spiteful: this was totally avoidable. The idea of going virtual and hybrid with our meetings is old. The education was always there. It was old when I learned about it for the first time at IMEX in Frankfurt in 2012. We should have known better. Yet, here we are.

I am blessed to be serving a company that has taken on the daunting task of helping our customers making that pivot to virtual. The learnings of the past months were intense, amazing, sometimes frustrating, and now I am confident with virtual meetings. And you will, too, very soon. And there's one thing I would like to share with you, which I have learned, yet nobody talks about it.

Steer clear of Skeuomorphism in virtual events.

When I first heard the word skeuomorphism, I thought this must be a very strange concept. Turns out, they are everywhere. The Interaction Design Foundation defines them as follows:

Skeuomorphism is a term most often used in graphical user interface design to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them.

Maybe the most iconic use of that tactic is the Recycle Bin on our desktops. It is super clear what that tool does and how it works because we understand what a recycling bin is. And, actually, the recycling bin is a really good skeuomorph. If you throw something in your bin, you can always pick it up from there, that is until the cleaners - or yourself - throw it out for good. And that's exactly how the recycle bin on your computer works. When the first smartphones arrived especially Apple headed a movement of pushing familiar looking design elements into user interfaces. Do you still remember that your first calculator smartphone app had physical buttons? And so did the dial pad. The audio recording app looked like a physical vintage microphone (see above). You may have noticed that most of those elements are gone now: the Notes app no longer has lined paper, the stopwatch does not look like a stopwatch anymore, and so on. This is due to a new designer taking over at Apple - in 2013, Apple designer Jony Ive said:

...we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn't need physical buttons, they understood the benefits.

In other words, skeuomorphisms are great to get people used to something that is familiar to them in one environment, but unfamiliar in a different environment. And once people know how to move around, get rid of them.

And here we are, in 2020, still building virtual conference websites that look like conference halls, tradeshow booths, and meeting rooms. They don't look as creepy as the 2012 CDC example above, but still. I understand that, if your conference got canceled, you may seek comfort in rebuilding your setting just the way you'd had it at your meeting. Being an event planner myself, my reflex would be similar. Yet, you are punishing your attendees. Do not use Skeuomorphisms, here is why:

There is no need for an introduction to your browser

Over the past decade, digital society has moved in many parts from standalone software that runs locally on machines to a browser-based version. Websites run in browsers, so does your email client, maybe your phone app, your videoconferencing tool, your word processor, your accounting tool and pretty much every modern tool lives in a browser - with the exception of really power-hungry tools, such as video editing and graphics tools. People know how to use a browser. We don't have to teach them. Furthermore, virtual events can successfully build on the design choices of video streaming platforms, such as YouTube and Vimeo, networking tools such as LinkedIn, Slack (to an extent) and Facebook, or learning management systems such as Skillshare and Coursera, have developed. Because that is what our virtual experiences are. They are about entertainment, education, and networking - to varying degrees. These platforms all share a high acceptance among internet users, we understand intuitively how they work and can use them proficiently. Introducing a new design paradigm means essentially trying to reinvent the wheel.

Conference rooms are a terrible choice to illustrate what your event experience is about

The reason why conferences look the way they quite often look is that we as meeting planners face design constraints imposed by the architecture of conference centers. While purpose-built conference centers follow a pretty good logic (with lobbies at the entrance, main theatres right behind it and meeting rooms left and right or up and down) they are the result of a compromise made between architects, private businesses, governments and about anyone else involved in building conference centers. They may be purpose-built, but only within a given framework. Even then, conference centers are bland and all look very similar (sure, the CCH in Hamburg has an iconic roof-top garden, the old Fira in Barcelona is a design marvel and that long walk in the San Diego conference center is quite something). And that is a good thing. The blander they are, the easier it becomes for us, meeting planners and meeting designers, to project our visions and fill the space with life. Maybe Berlin's CityCube even perfected this idea with their brutalism-like concrete walls everywhere. It is a fabulous venue after all.

Taking a real-life conference center, then projecting our meeting vision into it, and then taking this entire analog concept and digitizing it is, for the lack of a better word, absolutely absurd. It is the meetings industry counterpart of taking a smartphone video of a video you see on TV. There is no value to this kind of behaviour.

You are crippling the experience you could provide online

Instead, we should focus on how we can build something amazing online. Howard Roark, the fictional architect in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead faced backlash in design school because he refused to build Roman-style columns out of concrete. And while Ayn Rand is probably the worst inspiration I could pick for a modern society, her character Howard had a point: the reason why Roman columns looked the way they looked was not purely esthetic, but had much to do with how to work the materials such as marble. Instead, according to Roark, concrete, glass, and steel should find their own design language and speak to their natural material strengths.

The same is true online. This crisis is messy and annoying, I get it. But we also have the fabulous opportunity of building something new and exciting, something that changes the way we meet, collaborate, enjoy, and network. Putting meetings online provides us with new tools, interactive games, mass participation from around the world, internationalisation aspects, the application of advanced technologies such as AI and modern design tools. And yet, here we are, rebuilding conference centers in 3D. Have we lost our collective minds?

They lead us to the infamous uncanny valley

Another point focusses on the wellbeing of your attendees. Going to a conference has a lot to do with identity, who you are, and whom you represent. Virtual environments suffer an effect referred to as the uncanny valley. What it means, and you surely observed this in computer games or animated movies is the following: a poorly modeled real-world object looks poorly modeled. The better you model it, the more real it looks. However, interestingly, once you get very close to reality, virtual models start looking strange to us again before we finally cross the threshold of being indistinguishable from reality. So unless you are perfectly representing reality, better actually means worse after a specific point. As buildings are rather easy to build in 3D, we are at that point and it makes your attendees uncomfortable. Instead, if we insist on 3D worlds, we should completely refrain from using known environments - this is where games like Animal Crossing (which I, admittedly, have been playing) get it very right. They don't try to look real. Thus they are comforting.

You are wasting resources

Finally, building these environments costs time and money. And, especially if we are talking 3D environments, they also cost other resources, such as computing power. Why nobody should spend time wasting time and money should be pretty clear to most of us. And naturally, we tend to ask ourselves: why are we doing this? So think about it: why are you even considering using Skeuomorphisms? Do they actually serve a purpose, or are you mostly lost in terms of how to build an online conference? If the latter is the case: this is fine. Again: we all are, you are not alone.

Wasting computing power is something nobody talks about much in our industry. Computing power, memory, and other IT resources are cheap and abundant. However, 99.5% of all data created never gets used. Meanwhile, the power consumption of the internet skyrockets. And yes, digitization has been a greater force for good so far, but just because something is cheap it doesn't mean we should be wasteful. Once we are done reducing our travel, shipping, food, and transport footprints, we need to start considering our IT footprint. May as well do it now.

How IMEX still got it right

IMEX suffered a heavy blow when its core product, the most relevant tradeshow in the B2B events industry, got canceled due to, you know, COVID-19. While, in general, the idea of tradeshows is a subject for another rant, IMEX is very dear to me. IMEX decided to refund their exhibitors and have the education bit online. But instead of going down the route of rebuilding their Frankfurt venue online, they went completely crazy and built an island world, that also has an inexplicable pine forest next to it, there are huts and palms and trees and campfires, a Buddha statue and a yoga mat. Also, did I mention, the islands are floating in some kind of blue-ish void. Sounds unimaginable? Well, it is unimaginable in the real world, but online you can do that. And what IMEX managed is to create visually different experiences, depending on whether you are looking for Education or Community, and within those, you can explore the world and in a playful manner get to know their world and their event.

Planet IMEX slows down my computer quite a bit. But they got it right on my other Skeuomorph-criticisms: they used it not to explain what an online conference is, but their approach is highly targeted towards explaining what they are about. Education and Community, and their commitment and connection to the environment. You can understand that just by looking at a single screenshot. They did not choose to remodel a conference center. And above all, they defied real-world physics to build an experience. And this is what we as event planners should be doing. Why the actual meetings happened in a skeuomorphic environment is something I still have to figure out, but here's something else we have to accept about virtual events: we have all become really good at running real-world events. We can only build virtual events by failing in the beginning. We cannot get things right off the start.

So there are good Skeuomorphisms?

You may wonder: if IMEX got it right, is there a place for Skeuomorphisms?

Yes, there is. But only very limited.

Whenever you introduce something truly novel in a digital environment, that somehow works in real life, you may opt for skeuomorphs. Random networking may be such a use-case. We understand easily how to move around tables and awkwardly crash conversations in the real world. So in the first iteration of such a product, maybe having virtual tables makes sense. Until we all get it. There is, however, no need to remodel the same tables you get in every board room - most conference tables do not look very inspiring to begin with.

If you are using Skeuomorphisms, they have to serve a purpose. The design 101 mantra, "form follows function" should also apply in our virtual events. And if we regard events as places of entertainment, education, and networking, rebuilding your conference center serves no purpose. We, being the immensely creative industry we are, should know better.