Physical product design — next generation software tools
This post covers one aspect of dapulse’s product vision, it explains how we chose to make things simple and intuitive in a way users love.
Humans
We are born in a physics driven environment and a large portion of our brain is devoted to understanding and navigating in our surroundings. There are rules in the physical world we are used too but in most of the software we use they simply do not exist. Using physicality opens the door to dramatically increased simplicity that emotes love from users.
Physical Software Design Concepts
Orientation: in real life, things do not pop out of thin air, they also do not disappear in an instant, instead they move around in and out of our sight — when a fast car appears as a small dot in the horizon it becomes larger as it approaches us, then disappears in the same fashion — not instantly. In software though, thing pop all the time, screens change and users are teleported into new views as a default. Users are accustomed to it, but it disorientates and makes them think of “what just happened?”, “where am I now?” they lose precious seconds every time this happens — it’s not intuitive.
Orientation usage: move things with animations — don’t throw users from place to place. They will lose orientation and precious seconds to get their new bearing.
Organisation: In the physical world we can pick only one way to organize things from the many choices we have, books can be sorted by name or by size — not both at the same time, because things just can’t be in two places at the same time. In software we tag things and have many ways to view them, things can sometimes never exist in a place in the software we can reach by navigation — just in the meta verse, To find them we need to do something logical (not physical) — like search. The consequence is that real life is simpler, when we design products, it’s better to make people choose one way to look at things as default and add all the powerfull stuff later on — make the default first choice simple and physical!
Organisation usage: allow one simple physical organisation method — preferably one where things are not hidden in folders or a hierarchy, only later allow other dynamic sorting ways that are advanced — keep basic things simple
Like I left it, physical stuff have a tendency to stay as you left them. Your desk for example can be organized in a complete mess just like you like it and it’ll stay that way. Software almost always don’t keep it’s state, you need to find your path to things again and again. The concept of “staying the same” is hard to grasp because most software is not physicaly designed — but once it starts being physical more of this happens.
“Like I left it” usage: Software should keep it’s state, for this you must have automatic save.
Eye-fold: In the real world things never cover 100% of your view, even if they are very close. In software they almost always do. This makes users lose orientation and makes navigation harder. Popups are a good method to not abstract the entire view. Popups give better orientation, users know how to go back when things are built in layers — like 3d reality.
Eye-fold usage: you should layer your software in a way that gives orientation and history of your actions. In mobile first design this is also possible using animations instead of popups, it will cover the whole view but keep a feeling of physical layers and orientation.
Touch: When we want to move things around we touch them, and they move. In software when we move things we need to open menus and pick a logical place in a list or a-like, when we do they vanish from view instantly. Drag-n-drop exist — its not used everywhere — and when it is, users like it — it’s a fundamental tool in physical design.
Touch usage: drag-n-drop is very widely used in software today. To be able to get more of touch and drag — we need to have more of the other aspects of physical design, the less we cover 100% of the view the more we can drag to other places, the more we keep the state of things the more we can drag things into those states, the more we animate layers the more we can drag into them.
Predictability: In the real world you know what to expect. When you open a door it’ll reveal what’s inside. You can also assess the size of things. If you open a big door you’ll find a room, if you open a small door it’ll be a closet — you know beforehand. In software you have no idea what will happen when you click something, if it will pop up, redirect, be editable. You just don’t know — adding a lot of uncertainty and dread to exploring a new software — why — because it’s not intuitive.
Predictability is still an unsolved challenge in software, even with physical design, using known UI elements is the best way we found to be predictable — pulldown menus, tabs, links and buttons. Some companies like amazon also write what’s going to happen under the button, this is not intuitive but better than nothing.
If you have breakthrough ideas on how to make predictability intuitive — please share.
Summary of Physical Design
Technology is becoming more human friendly thanks to physical design. Touch screens and touch screen software design has made the most use of it. There is still much more to be done, most desktop software and web tools have yet to make that leap. At dapulse we feel strongly that physical design is the best way to make apps more intuitive to humans. Physical Design requires a huge effort from software developers, it requires more computational resources from computers and it requires innovative ideas from UX and UI teams. Companies that value simplicity and ease of use should make that effort, we do.
Physical designs is 1 of 3 core product values we have at dapulse
read about it here
