Invisible Applications
UX design without GUIs
Many popular visions of the future turn every available surface into a computing interface, and every moment or action of the day into a computing interaction. But such profoundly inhuman visions ignore what’s really happening to our relationship with technology.
Computers are dissolving in three directions — into the cloud, into the environment, and into our bodies — and as they do so they will have to reduce or lose altogether what we would traditionally call an “interface.”
In 2011/12 a first generation of (admittedly flawed) services including the Nest learning thermostat and Apple’s Siri showed us some early indications of what this can mean. Natural language processing (NLP) can let us use our voices as input. Cloud-based computing power can resolve ambiguous instructions, understand behavioural patterns over time, and reduce “answers” to their simplest and most digestible form: a couple of words (Siri) or a single numerical value (Nest). Our hands, eyes, and minds are free to engage with the real world and real people around us.
While these commercial products lag behind their film equivalents (from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Samantha in Her), a new generation of products including the Amazon Echo and the Jibo promise to bring us significantly closer to a world in which cloud robotics and artificial intelligence are taken for granted in our daily lives.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for these same ideas to find expression in services that exploit today’s mobile phones. These might be described as “invisible apps,” because they would shun flashy infographics and rich GUIs in favour of minimal, timely, personal, and humanised content. They could represent a first step toward a future of technologically supported simplicity — if designers and consumers are ready to accept it.
This article was originally published in a slightly different form in December 2012 as part of the @frogdesign publication “Technology trends for 2013".
For further reading see: “Designing Smart Experiences” by Gianluca Brugnoli.
