dessalles

More conference note-iness…

The first panel I attended at this year’s SXSW was Kill Your Mouse: Kinetic Computing Arrives Main Stage, which was of the persuasion that the keyboard and mouse, perennial all-rounders, will be out performed by a growing number of specialized, role-playing “natural user interfaces” – optimally tailored for specific applications and generally more pleasurable to use. No clear definition was offered as to what makes an interface “natural”, but the panelists threw out some interesting ideas. Kai Huang, co-founder of Red Octane (publisher of Guitar Hero), talked about pulling game elements out of the screen and placing them into the hands of users. These physical interfaces then become social objects around which social experiences organize. Following the same line of thought, Kristin Alexander from the Microsoft Surface Computing group discussed how the human scale of some physical interfaces enable richer multi-user experiences (à la Microsoft’s Surface). And Brewster Kahle seemed on the verge of declaring the death of general computing in favor for “appliance computing”. The common thread of the panelists seemed to be that these specialized, contextual, human scale, physical interfaces have the potential to flatten all but the steepest learning curves with their “natural” intuitiveness.

A couple thoughts…
In any conversation about intuitive interfaces someone inevitably starts talking about affordances, or “naturalness” as it were. On the other hand, learning – and specifically learning by watching – isn’t discussed as frequently as it should. In my mind, the greatest advantage human-scale interfaces have over their smaller palm-sized counterparts is that they’re easier to learn by watching someone else use them. And I suspect more times than not, people qualify interfaces as “intuitive” when their ease of use is more likely due to a significant amount of observational learning that took place up front. Can you think of an interface you consider exceptionally intuitive that you didn’t watch someone else use before you picked it up for the first time? While I don’t doubt some interfaces are inherently superior in their design, I suspect if you drop one of these “natural user interfaces” in front of someone who’d never seen it before, they’d face a fairly common learning curve. And this brings me to my second thought, which is that the specialized-vs-standardized pendulum seems to be in full motion and well on it’s way towards over-contextualized. As the number of distinctive user interfaces grow, so too will the number of distinctly crappy interfaces and shortly thereafter we’ll start hearing cries for universal interfaces and standardized design patterns.