Complexity in super simple and friendly dress? Yes, please.

Small example: On my iPhone music player I want to shuffle all songs but there are exceptions — some albums I want to play as they were supposed to be played.

Technically: it’s just one easy setting associated with the album.

Problem: really difficult to come up with good user interface (UI) component where I could be able to set this up. Not because of this particual request but because there may be hundreds of other requests like this.

Solution: This is marginal request andfor the sake of simplicity and clean UI … forget it.

Everyone likes the simplicity, including me.

Marginal functionalities are victims of this desire for simple and clean UI.

Until text/speech UI.

Still the same UI (text/voice input). The user doesn’t see the complexity behind. There is no “do you know that when you push option-key and click this, you will see more options?”. There is just “You asked for a coffee, try to ask for a lemonade”.

or…

“Don’t shuffle this album again.” Roger.

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It is not all that black-and-white, of course. Great graphical and physical UIs (or should we name it non-conversational UI?) are much better for some tasks than any text/voice (conversational?) UI. Think the emergency device, books, big volume control on our LP player and much, much more.

The same as graphical UI had stages (dumb and simple -> complex -> clever and simple but limited) probably there are and for sure there will be horrible text/voice UIs.

After all — it’s all about understanding the user.

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It’s impossible to overlook the text UI and bot development for anybody who is curious about life, design and technology. And that’s me.

I’m happy to read in the comments bellow or on the twitter (@dadc) what do you think.

David Cizek