A Brief History of Human Centered Design
Dear Jason,
I believe all of the tools we use as a species share the same end result, they apply a force on another object. During the Renaissance, scientists defined a set of six simple machines that they determined are the building blocks of all machines. These include the lever, wheel/axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. These six machines were the core of every invention for centuries, that is until electricity showed up. It changed everything. We were no longer restricted to the simple machines because suddenly we could manipulate forces in ways never thought possible before. We could run wires hundreds of miles and transmit binary signals in a matter of moments. It wasn’t long before we realized we could compound those binary signals together to create complex messages and eventually digital displays.
Today we can create images on screens that respond instantaneously to a human’s input. Just think about how we can drag our finger across the front of our phones and the entire screen instantly reacts to the movement, that’s some crazy magic happening if you ask me. Before we even realized the implications of what we had created, an entirely new set of interfaces were born. Just as the six simple machines were the building blocks of complex machinery, the touch screen is the foundation for apps.
Although these touch screens were created only a decade ago, we’ve made great progress in creating intuitive and meaningful human interactions. For a long time, the leading software companies were dictating best practices for human centered design, and they often looked to the physical world for inspiration. Take Apple for example, they had just created one of the most breakthrough devices, the iPhone, but they recognized that there wasn’t a strong precedent for touch interactions. How could they signify that a button is clickable without a cursor changing as the user hovers over it? Simple, they followed the precedents set forth in the physical world, a practice often referred to as skeuomorphic design.
It naturally just makes sense. We recognize a button in the physical world because it has depth appears that it can be pressed, so they did the same thing. By adding a gradient and animating the object’s depth on press, they were able to mimic a human’s interaction with a real world button.
This set the precedent for years to come. As new digital products began to appear, their designers looked towards the physical world for inspiration. Online poker games looked just like real tables, music mixing applications matched the appearance of a DJ’s turntable. Even Apple’s iBooks app looked just like a wooden bookshelf, stocked with an infinite amount of texts.
As the years went on we began to see interactions become abstracted from the precedents created from the physical world. Not after long humans started to recognize digital patterns and were no longer dependent upon the the visual cues that mimicked the physical world. These new patterns sparked the rise of flat design. Suddenly we could create interfaces that are built for the digital world rather than the physical world.
Today there are a large amount of interaction precedents designed just for the digital world, such as Google’s Material Design. As we move forward, it is our responsibility to ensure that these interactions remain intuitive to the user. Yet we must experiment with new interaction patterns so that we can continue to evolve our tools just as we always have.
Even though it’s been just under a decade since the iPhone’s touch screen reinvented digital interactions, I think we’re due for another evolution sometime soon, what do you think?
Cheers,
Ben
