Designing Automation: Digital vs. Physical

Public bathroom appliances are more advanced than our mobile devices.

Reducing the effort users put towards a digital activity is a good thing. If a user has to click six times to share a person’s contact info through a text message, that is a poor user experience (UX). If they click twice, that’s better UX. But what if they never had to click?

What..?

The physical world has become automated. If you want a paper towel, just put your hands under the [typically horrible] sensor. If you want to walk through a door, just walk through it — it will open.

The digital world is behind the physical world.

Imagine if there were no automated doors or paper towel dispensers, that’s what our mobile UX is today. You still have to click many times to do relatively simple tasks (making calls, adding contacts, sending “here” text messages).

If your friend texts you for another person’s number, you have to click 5-8 times before you are able to share the number with your friend. What if you didn’t have to touch anything to give them the number? — and no I’m not suggesting Siri/Google Voice. What if the friend you are sharing with could access the information through your phone? What if all you had to do was allow it, similar to the paper towel dispenser?

Automatic app updates are a very good start, but I think we have a long way to come. Some ideas may be a little intrusive, but don’t let that scare you off. The point here is to think bigger.

Situationally-Aware Automation

I’m not confusing these interactions with those of IFTTT. These interactions are native to your mobile devices, think iOS9 or 10. Rather than putting the Internet to work for us, we should put our phones to work for us.

I think these automations can be devised up into different modes, so your phone does certain tasks based on your location and the time of day. The automations can also be new ideas entirely, like an alternative spin on a text message that serves as a notification and not a message. Think about how annoying it is to text someone, “here,” when you just called them and said you would pick them up in five minutes. A new type of automation should know when you have arrived and send your friend an automatic notification.

So where does it end?

“Are you suggesting Instagram should machine learn our favorites and automatically like them for us?”

No, well maybe, it’s up to you. Automation need to always be set by preferences. For instance, you would need some boundaries for your friends to access your contact list. I think in order to make the next strides in design and development we need to continue working on automations to mimic what is already set in the physical world.

There is a point in which automation may go to far, and the joys of human-computer interaction are lost. People feel connected through their devices, but if their devices do all the connecting then the personal touch is lost.

Developing New Ideas

Take what annoys you about your mobile devices, and consider automations that could arise to make those annoyances go away. Think about reducing the number of clicks and touches you have to do to complete an action, or respond to an interaction. Don’t just try to improve the popular ideas from Dribbble, think of your own.

Good luck.