3 posts tagged “user interface”

    Interaction design not only requires a bundle of testing but it requires a lot of personal experience. As a developer, it would be incredibly difficult to design a product without any familiarity to the end result. Without personal experience to the end product, emotional attachment will be bias in favor of ease of development. As an interaction designer it is important to remember that product experience to users, no matter what the product, count on tasks being obvious.

    Taking a quick glance at the two remotes above, what tasks can you determine will be obvious to complete. Let's suppose that the person will be watching TV in the dark. Without being able to look at the remote, will it be easy to figure out what buttons to press? The remote on the right uses differing shapes, placement and space around the buttons to distinguish tasks from one another. The user will be able to learn how to use the remote during daylight or under the light. Familiarity with the product soon begets the obvious nature to complete tasks.

    Of course, on the left, lights allow the user to see which button is which and how to complete a task like changing the channel. However, due to the number of buttons and the few spacing there is between them - the user will have to look at their remote every time they want to use it.

    Obvious interaction is not so obvious when it of course depends on perspective. Anyone on a team will have a differing perspective of obvious interaction when they are looking at the same product. However, the key point in making things obvious is about taking away prerequisites. So for instance, in the remote example lighting was taken away. Without looking at the remote which is easier? How often will the user need to relearn the interface? How long will it take to learn the interface the first time? These are a few important questions when thinking about obvious interaction.

    Recently, I picked up an incredibly awesome tool called Enso from Humanized. Enso is all about bringing the ease of creating, navigating and manipulating content through commands. In the old days we used commands to get tasks done. As the GUI undoubtedly made things much easier to work with, it has also made things undoubtedly difficult to work with as everyone has their own opinions and natural bias towards one method of interaction over another - as well as color schemes..etc. But the one aspect that has us seemingly removed in this cumbersome Web 2.0  world is distraction. Some call it multi-tasking, I would disagree and say that we have created a monster for distraction.

    Not to say that some distractions aren't bad, but the thought is on how applications are increasing the gaps between the tasks we want to accomplish and the content that we are dealing with. Take for instance the fact that the market is now flooded with a dozen different social networks; there are hundreds of paint tools, editors and more. The market has a way with filtering these products out with emergence - or the difference in what is the best possible yet practical solution for the major audience.

    Nevertheless, it brings an motivating perspective towards the very definition of what operating systems are supposed to do for us. When I/O operations became a habitual necessity for computing technology it was added as a standard protocol to which all operating environments follow. However, today we are at a point where the desktop's monolithic structure has created an environment where dozens of applications are added due to what the user has asked for.

    The idea of adding feature after feature is fairly common among applications as well. In addition to this, there is integration - where one product's feature must integrate or serve another product in some form. For instance, Vox uses the Flickr API to allow users to add pictures to to posts. But what happens if you don't have a Flickr account, you just want to put pictures you got from your camera. Well, not only does Vox have to integrate with Flickr, they need to handle their own picture uploading service as well. When in reality, the only service that Vox is interested in it giving users the ability to write content to their blogs.

    In search technology, we have the ability to look up any website, blog, video and picture that exists on the web. We type a query and off it goes. The web provides a very nice tool for search. But how much have we provided in the web for commands? Telling the web to do something for you isn't as easy, but it definitely could be thought along the same lines. We have had the ability to aggregate content to serve information to users; what we need now is a way to aggregate services to serve tools to users. In that manner, we can begin to bring the level in which developers are typically mounted on up to the user's perspective.