Disquiet

I’ve been trying out various apps and services that facilitate the collection of browser-based documents. I don’t need much in terms of long-term collation, mostly items on a week-by-week basis, mostly for my This Week in Sound newsletter. Instaper is a leading such option. There are also: Pocket, synced bookmarks (I’m a longtime user of pinboard.in, just shy of a decade), and the Read Later panel in the Safari browser, among numerous — some days it feels like countless — other options.

These tools have their pros and cons, their pluses and minuses, and they have their idiosyncrasies. Some, including Instapaper, allow you to hear a document read back to you — what’s referred to as “text-to-speech.” What struck me in particular about Instapaper is the voice implementation (perhaps archaic, as text-to-speech goes) and also an aspect of the text-to-speech interface, which displays the following:

It shows a pair of headphones next to the word “Speak.” The headphones icon suggests one listens, which is appropriate. The word “Speak” suggests — and I say this at the risk of, you know, jumping to a conclusion — that the user speaks, which is counterintuitive. Why, I ask, doesn’t this show headphones and the word “Listen”? Especially today, in a time of widespread speech-to-text utilization.

Complicating the scenario further is the phrase “Speed Read” directly above. This is, in fact, an especially idiosyncratic function within Instapaper. What it does is flash the words, one at a time. For some people this is apparently a means for reading quickly. For others it might feel like being a subject of brainwashing in A Clockwork Orange.

In any case, what matters is that the appearance of “Speed Read” above “Speak” gets confusing, because “Speak” is the tool that reads to you, and “Speak” in fact does have a submenu that lets you adjust the speed at which it reads to you. You can see how this can become not so much confusing as concerning. Odd incongruences can taint an interface and, by extension, a product.

There’s a thing about utilities like Instapaper, and I think of it as the “if only” factor, for every app has its little shortcomings: if only it was cheaper, if only it didn’t have a subscription cost, if only it had folders, if only the fonts appealed to me, if only it worked offline, if only it were cross-platform, and so forth. If Instapaper didn’t have this text-to-speech feature, I might not have missed it. Since the app has the feature, I find myself factoring my relative satisfaction with the implementation into my decision-making in terms of adoption.

I have a lot of friends who swear by Instapaper, and several of them didn’t even know about or at least don’t use the “Speak” function. It all comes down to personal habits, but personal habits in aggregate are a powerful force in the development and evolution of interface norms. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine that the word “Speak” next to a pair of headphones will become the universal symbol of text-to-speech. Note, above, how the New York Times, which recently launched its own audio-specific service, signals the same feature on its main website. And below is how The New Yorker, on its website, which has actual humans (not digital facsimiles toiling tirelessly syllable by syllable) doing the reading, highlights the availability:

And no, I still haven’t decided on an option. But such is digital life.