Zero UI
Andy Goodman explores a possible future in which we don’t need complicated interfaces to interact with our products
Zero UI has been sometimes misinterpreted as meaning getting rid of the interface entirely. What it actually refers to is a process where many of the visual interfaces we currently spend so much time with recede into the background, leaving us open to engage with the stuff that is important and useful to us. It is analogous to inbox zero, where we strive to achieve a blissful state in which everything is dealt with, calm and invisible. If that is possible, of course.
I started my career as an interaction designer in 1994, although it wasn’t called interaction design then. My job title was probably ‘graphic designer’ , and since then I have been labelled a UX designer, experience designer and service designer. What we can deduce from these titles is that the object being designed has become less tangible over time, and less to do with interactions happening on the screen. I’m not sure what people that practice Zero UI will be called, but it will be something different again.
Electronic mesh
This shift away from the very controllable — although quite primitive — environment of screen and pointer means the things we are trying to do are becoming more complex. They now have to take into account a lot more ideas around human behaviours, motivation, emotion, and all kinds of weird things like that.
We’ve always had to bring aspects of psychology and perception into our work, admittedly in a pretty amateurish way most the time. Understanding what would make someone click a button, how users would retain information, and the barriers to committing to a decision is important — but for all the elegance of the interfaces we have designed, they are all two-dimensional, with simplistic cues and triggers.
As we move into a connected world where objects, people and environments are all joined together by a mesh of invisible electronic tethers, the decision making, the services we want, and the results we expect from our interactions become exponentially more complicated. Not only will a system have to predict what someone wants to do next, but it will also need to know where they are, where they are heading and what their intent is. It will be about how we as humans interact with entire systems, and how the constellations of things around us become part of an endless dialogue between us and the world.
I don’t think there is a huge groundswell of opinion bemoaning the terribleness of interactive systems, products and devices. Quite the opposite in fact; we seem to be entranced by them all. And why not? The devices are beautiful, the systems are intelligent and the services make life so much easier. A few dissident voices, from the likes of Sherry Turkle, have put together pretty strong arguments for the social and emotional dissonance that our addiction to electronic media causes. But in the end the benefit the digital world has brought us far exceeds the problems it has caused.
Nevertheless, we can all agree that removing the complexity these devices bring into our lives would be a genuine improvement on the state of things. Not just for the older generations, who try as they might are often confounded by the intricacy and closed-shop paradigms of software, but for all of us that have ever struggled with an update or service switch.
Visual creatures
The phrase ‘Zero UI’ is designed to provoke people, because as designers we spend a lot of time thinking about the way things look, and not much time thinking about anything else. It is inevitable because of the way platforms and computer interfaces have always been, and also the way that we interact with the world generally. We are primarily visual animals, and so we sometimes forget how important all those other senses are in conveying experience, and how important a part of our memory and identity they are.
If we think of the ways in which we can make use of those other senses, we can start creating interactions that become more intuitive, more pleasurable and more subtle; and that create less work for us. The objective is to be able to spend less time fiddling around with computers, but still achieve the same outcomes, enjoy the content they provide for us and the communications they enable.
The irony is that rather than delivering on the promise of freedom, computers have in some sense enslaved us. Not in a Terminator or Matrix sense, but in a much more mundane way. It’s the fact that the battery life on our phone isn’t good enough, or that we can’t work out what’s wrong with our router that’s causing most problems. Who would have thought such banal things would become such a major factor in our lives?
Because the machines haven’t been designed well enough, it feels sometimes like we’re serving them rather than the other way around. We’re constantly having to feed them and keep them warm and keep them powered. Kevin Kelly’s seminal book What Technology Wants alludes to this idea that machines are a kind of domesticated animal that have evolved over time to get us to look after them.
Because the machines haven’t been designed well enough, it feels sometimes like we’re serving them rather than the other way around. We’re constantly having to feed them and keep them warm and keep them powered
Established patterns
Let’s wind back and consider the problem interaction design was there to solve initially. It was designed to help us understand how a computer or a machine works and provide an interface for us to operate it. When I was younger, I always knew I was going to do something to do with computers and design because I was the only one in the family that could programme the VCR. I would think: this is really bad, why can’t it be easier? That is the motivation of any designer.
A lot of those purely functional parts of the UI have been solved now, with the help of patterns that are pretty good for simple kinds of interface problems. You could go and design a whole different set of patterns, but they probably wouldn’t be as good and would require people to learn new ways of interacting.
However, there is a whole set of more complex things we are trying to do now, which are really quite hard problems to solve. One example is the Uber app on your Apple watch: in principle a genius simplification of the experience — just open the app and call a car. But we all know how flaky GPS is, what if the car gets sent two blocks away? With such a simple interface the user has no way of adjusting the information to give the precision required. So they end up checking on their phone and the magic is killed. We will need multiple layers of failsafe and redundancy in systems to allow these types of interactions to become commonplace.
Coordinated systems
Imagine a Zero UI scenario where the user wants to travel to the other side of the country. Leaving aside the booking of the plane ticket for now (the complexity of which requires a detailed visual interface), all the systems that enable you to get to your destination could coordinate, from the alarm that gets you up in the morning, to your coffee machine grinding a double shot, to the alert that tells you when to leave and that you need to take the subway rather than trying to get a cab across town at that time of morning, to the system that allows you to walk straight through the pay barrier at the train station, and so on.
Recently Matías Duarte, Google’s VP of design, talked about how atomised apps are the future of the mobile experience, and how even computer power will be distributed into smaller units, away from the device. This is very close to the vision I have for Zero UI, but perhaps a bit more conservative (necessarily). I would love to see a world where we can go about our daily business without having to waste valuable brain cycles on trivial things like making sure the cab finds our exact GPS coordinate.
Andy is a pioneer of the service design industry and part-time futurist. He’s a frequent speaker at SxSW, TEDx and O’Reilly, and writes about emerging technology
This article originally appeared in issue 279 (May 2016) of net magazine.
