Why do RSS readers look like email clients?
9 days ago
- #RSS
- #User Experience
- #Design Psychology
- The author reflects on a unique guilt felt when returning to an RSS feed reader after absence, likening it to entering an empty room where no one was waiting.
- Questions why RSS readers mimic email clients, tracing this design back to Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire in 2002, which adopted a familiar layout to ease user adoption.
- Highlights the unintended consequence of inheriting email's psychological baggage—like unread counts—without the actual social obligations, leading to unnecessary anxiety.
- Brent Simmons himself questions why, after 22 years, RSS readers still follow his original design instead of exploring new paradigms.
- The article suggests that dressing new technologies in old interfaces imports outdated emotional weights, coining the phenomenon as yet unnamed but deeply felt.