Tags to Richness

I’ve spent some time the last couple weeks trying to envision the near and long-term future of interfaces.  I came away with the following useful nuggets.

1. Currently interfaces are moving out into the world where the people are

In my mind the biggest breakthrough with smart phones is that all that functionality that used to be on that computer in the corner is now traveling with me out in the world.  I’m more compelled to use technology now because it’s with me as I live my life.  Mark Weiser called it ubiquitous computing.  My lifetime will most likely see ubiquitous computing reach an advanced level of maturation.

2. But the real event will be when we finally learn to reprogram our biology and the biology around us

Ubiquitous computing in its current state is about making smaller computers that can be a part of a variety of current and future devices.  But I ask you, why waste time creating new devices when you can just reprogram the devices already out there, i.e. our bodies, minds and the nature all around us.  The sad or happy truth is that this will happen some day whether we like it or not.  The six million dollar question is who will do it first and how humanistic will they be? But it’s exciting to me to think about reprogramming the human brain to increase it’s memory speed and capacity, for example.  Or better yet, being able to transfer our memories and our identity over time, defeating death.

3. The mash-up of artificial intelligence and applications

Back to the short-term, artificial intelligence is really the future of apps.  I don’t know about you but I absolutely hate yet another app I have to learn and spend time using.  All those casual consumers who love their Wii’s won’t waste time with Gowalla, only the tech nerds care.  I personally don’t want more apps that require more of my time, I want less apps that do more.  Artificial intelligence, or the creation of an algorithm that can resolve complex problems for me with little input from me is where the real money is.

4. Eventually all those independent AIs will become the singularity

Eventually all the artificial intelligences we invent will merge into a single superintelligence that governs our lives.  This is what Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil called the singularity.  The funny thing is after pondering this for some time I realized that as a species we’ve been designing and iterating on the design of the singularity since the beginning of known time, we’ve just called it God or Gods instead of a supercomputer.  At some point when the pack of engineers sit down to invent a governing intelligence I imagine them referring to all the religious texts and history to devise the initial version.

There’s one other thing to keep in mind here though, and that has to do with reprogramming our biology.  When we start reprogramming our biology and re-engineering our bodies and minds, we may not need a singularity as we conceive of it today simply because at that point we will have become a different kind of species with different needs.

A little over a month ago I had a budget to hire freelancers and after settling into a pattern with them, this is how I’m getting value from them.  For this discussion there are essentially two phases to design, the critical thinking phase and the polish phase.  The critical thinking phase deals with mocking and feedback loops until the key ideas are captured in rough drawings.  The polish phase is when the website’s specific aesthetic details get applied to these mocks, like line width, color, margin size, etc.

I’ve found that it’s really fast and easy to get critical thinking from the freelancers, but that the polish will take a significant investment of time and energy in the freelancer before they are where I need them.  The issue has been that because I have a limited freelancer budget and because the freelancers tend to have day jobs I end up only getting 2-10 hours a week of their time at most.  For now I’ve found it’s more valuable to keep them cranking out critical thinking in the form of mocks while internally we apply the polish.

This method is similar to how Mike Shinoda describes Linkin Park’s album creation process.

In the new version of our process we’re no longer making albums and then touring and then starting from scratch and making new albums we are just writing all the time so that is to say when we’ve got a collection of songs we think is an album we release it

Like Linkin Park, I am having my freelancers create a pool of fleshed out ideas.  And when the various priorities align I can easily take one, apply the polish and hand it off to the development team.

(Quote Source: Meeting of a Thousand Suns (Video Documentary) on the iTunes A Thousand Suns (Deluxe Version) LP)

I recently read the Wired Magazine article The Web is Dead by Chris Anderson, and the counter post ‘New Twitter’ shows the Web isn’t dead by Pete Cashmore.  In Anderson’s article he argues that people are trending away from the web and into whatever devices will give them what they want the fastest and easiest.  Cashmore counters by saying that Twitter has seen the light and is striving to provide the best web and mobile experiences it can to survive.

The truth is, the web isn’t dead, it’s just well defined.  Anderson is right that what will ultimately drive people’s spending habits is ease of use and reliability.  People will always choose the easiest most reliable route no matter what the device.  What Anderson is alluding to is that all kinds of devices in all shapes and sizes are now cheap and easily accessible to consumers.  In other words, consumers now have an incredible amount of choices.  And their behavior says they could care less if they are using a browser, TV, tablet or phone as long as they get what they want in the fastest and easiest way possible.

Another way to look at it is that the web has it’s own unique set of advantages and disadvantages, just like TVs, phones and every other little niche device out there.  Each of these tools is easy and more reliable for certain tasks than the other devices.  For example, I’d never want to check movie times on a computer if I can do it on my phone.  But I’d also never want to type an article on a phone or a tablet when a keyboard and mouse are so much more efficient.

Anderson and Cashmore are really both right and both seeming to miss the conclusion.  Anderson is right that people just want the easiest and most reliable interface.  And Cashmore is right that websites are in fact realizing they need to be easier to use and more reliable.  But what I really learned from these two articles is that it is now clearer to us what the web is good for and what it is not good for.  And as a designer designing digital products that sell, I now have to take into account the absolute best delivery device, as well as the best UI, for the product I’m trying to create.

1. Interaction design is about designing choose your own adventure stories.  It’s simply a non-linear movie that allows your audience to choose their own path along the way.
2. Understand the difference between designing applications and games.  They are the same thing, they are just on opposite sides of the “purpose” spectrum.  Applications are for getting something done as fast as possible, games are for challenging goals.  Both create happiness and joy.  There is a lot of gray area in-between applications and games, and the best interaction design includes some blend of both purposes depending on what your interactions are for.
3. Understand and force yourself to think separately about Graphic Design, UI Design and Interaction Design.  They are not the same, but they encompass each other.  Graphic Design is fine art with a functional purpose, UI Design includes Graphic Design and is about creating an eye path.  Interaction Design includes both UI and Graphic Design and is about a successive series of UIs that take users to end goals.
4. Before anything else, read about the human brain.  Start with the book Brain Rules by John Medina.  Design is about communicating to brains and though we don’t have the human brain completely mapped out, it is still a machine with a simple set of rules.
5. Understand that what makes a human brain happy is simply choosing goals that matter to the individual, working towards them and then accomplishing them.  This is the basic formula to that chemical reaction we call joy and happiness.
6. Once you understand the human brain machine, study the computer machine.  Your whole purpose in life is to get the computer to talk to a human and guide that human towards a goal.  Someday computers will be humanoid in behavior but until then we have to fake it as best we can.
7. As a general rule, developers have spent more time coding than designing.  They default to thinking more like a computer, and less like a human.   The problem is that the scope of creating software is simply beyond your capacity to build alone.  You have to rely on developers so you must learn how to persuade the developers to do things that benefit humans more than things that benefit them and the computer systems they create.
8. The best way to understand developers is to be one for some period of time.  Most designers hate development, which is natural, but if you don’t do development yourself for a time so you can “get it”, you’ll always be at the mercy of what you don’t know.  Here’s another way to put it, who do you think is going to make a better building architect, the guy who has actually put up dry wall or the guy who hasn’t?
9. HTML is not development, it’s simply a gateway drug.  You must do PHP and MySQL (or something similar) or you’re wasting your time.  When you’ve written your first class from scratch, and you understand how it’s a beautiful thing to write classes then you can stop :)
10. Good interaction design comes from understanding and learning processes, patterns and standards.  In my experience artists tend to avoid this kind of thing.  But interaction design is so complex that these things are the only way to give yourself the necessary constraints to be creative in.  Otherwise you’ll get lost in the complexity and never finish anything.   The good news is that interaction is much more creative and fulfilling than graphic design or UI design alone so it’s worth the time to learn “the rules.”
11. Fine art is about expressing whatever the hell you want.  Interaction design is about what other people want, not what you want.  This was critical for me in my own career development.  Interaction design was not about what I wanted, I had to be able to put my user first.  This is much harder than you might think.  Everyone, even Alan Cooper, struggles with this.  The best way to put your user first is lots of continual research and testing.  “Research and testing,” I thought, “What? I’m an artist.”  Interaction design is about getting inside someone else’s head, understanding how they think and helping them accomplish something they want to do.  Research and testing is the most common way to accomplish this.
12. You’ll also want to study game design because  game designers have been doing interaction design with tons more time, money and resources than the web or software industry.  Companies like EA have been designing interactions much bigger in scale and much more complex than any computer company.  The game industry has found ways to solve problems the software industry hasn’t gotten to yet.
13. Interaction design is about logic and impulse, you have to be a master of both to be successful.  You’ll always fail at interaction design until you can start and stop your impulsive artist side at will.

The primary reason I became an interaction designer was because I wanted to make games.  This is probably true of most of us. 

I recently finished Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” and in the last chapter he talks about the difference between designing a game and designing an application (or device).  Paraphrasing, he essentially says the goal of a tool is ease of use, and for a game it’s (calculated) difficulty of use.

… making things difficult is tricky business.  If a game isn’t difficult enough, experienced players lose interest.  On the other hand, if it is too difficult, the initial enjoyment gives way to frustration.  …  The same rules that apply to make tasks understandable and usable also apply to make them more difficult and challenging … The rules must be applied intelligently, for ease of use or difficulty of use. (page 208)

If you didn’t have a chance to see Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference, specifically the demos of Kinect, you owe it to yourself to watch it right now.  The various Kinect demos start about 40 minutes in.  I took away 3 main points from the demo.

1. Kinect is a milestone in UI design.  Microsoft finally nailed the body as controller concept and now there will be a mad rush as standards are explored and established in this arena.

2. Efficiency of motion is going to be an issue and I don’t see body gestural interfaces having anything more then niche or simple applications.  Tony Walt wrote a great article about this on UX Magazine

3. Kinectimals is an amazing game and a sets the bar for pet games extremely high.  I have four little girls who I’ve watched use Nintendogs, Tamagotchi and Pokemon.  And watching that little girl play with that tiger in the Microsoft press conference was breath taking.  They absolutely nailed that genre of game.