Technological trends vs. User Experience
With every new trend, we seem to focus on technology rather than the problems it needs to solve and the human it needs to serve.
Spoiler alert: This is an introduction to my master’s thesis (available here) that tackles the question: “How might we design interactions and experiences for New and No User Interfaces – #nnUI?” Relating to designing for conversational UIs.
2007 has had an everlasting impact on me and of millions of people. I graduated and started my first job in the digital industry, which has not quite changed the world yet, though 😉. More importantly and on January 9th, 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.
Some experts were sceptical, downplayed, ignored, or even laughed at this product at first. Anyone still using a Nokia and Motorola — at least in the “developed countries”?
The iPhone has shaped the digital landscape, the way we use the internet and how we interact with technology nowadays. Some might correctly claim that Apple was not the first to introduce touchscreens, but they made them mainstream. Are you using a physical keyboard on your phone?
Trends come and go
Since the dot-com era, we have seen technological trends come and go. Around 2000 the dot-com bubble burst. The world wide web had become a commodity and possessing a Palm was considered cool. The mobile web was about to become a thing thanks to coloured displays, @wap, or MMS. However it was probably only with the launch and spread of the iPhone that the use of the mobile web became mainstream. Web development was focused on desktop computers. Fancy Adobe Flash websites were hyped. It was probably not until 2012 and Ethan Marcotte’s 2011 book release “Responsive Design” (Link to A Book Apart) when the industry turned the identically named design approach into practice and made it a buzzword.
“We want a responsive website”
I would hear from clients at the agency in which I worked then, rather than “what is the need of our user?”.
Simultaneously Facebook and “Social” were and still are buzzwords. Facebook pages and apps were a “must have” for companies, followed by a presence on any other hyped SOM platform.
Other web design trends became the talk of the town. The “mobile first” movement suggested that any web project should start with mobile in mind first. This was justified with the growing use of mobile devices.
Then there was the rise of native apps. Apple’s promotional claim “there is an App for that” got adopted by almost every company. They would release apps for anything without questioning a need, purpose, or user benefit.
The age of conversational UI
Now, in 2016 we seem to have entered the age of messaging, conversational UIs, chatbots, smart assistances and artificial intelligence.
“It’s clear to me that we are evolving from a mobile first to an AI first world (Google and Pichai, 2016)”.
The conversational UI trend seems to be a stop-over into a future where we do not use screens anymore. Design becomes invisible and anticipatory interacting unobtrusively on our behalf — in theory at least.
“The best interface is no interface (Krishna, 2015)”.
But we still tend to talk about technology for the sake of it and neglect the human and its problem we are trying to solve.
Technology vs. Human needs
Terms like “human-centred or user-centred design” and “User Experience Design” have been around for decades. Nevertheless, core principles of these philosophies still seem to be often neglected. Even when we look at “mature” products such as an “ordinary” laptop computer. We would assume that manufacturers have figured out by now, how to produce user-friendly devices and software. Well, reality seems to prove differently when we look at Apple’s latest MacBook Pro for example.
Their new top end models only offer USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports meaning I could not plug in any device I currently own without buying dongles. Hashtag #donglelife used by people complaining about it, even trended on Twitter.
As even industry leaders sometimes do not get established technology right, it seems more than necessary to thoroughly examine how to design for new and emerging technologies, before we do so.
In the scope of my master’s programme at Hyper Island, Manchester, UK, I have conducted a study to evaluate this issue and try to answer the following question:
How might we design interactions and experiences for New and No User Interfaces (nnUI)?
My research project examines how we can do so by keeping the user and human in mind first.
Find out more on:
http://www.dannessler.com/irp
My study has been conducted in collaboration with:
