CovertlyObvious

UI design limitations

Steve Frank wrote a great piece on the state of UI design.  Steve’s point about UI innovation mainly occuring in mobile devices got me thinking.  

Although I never was able to do much more that longingly look at the Newton, I was a loyal PalmOS user from the Palm Pilot 5000 through to the Treo 650 when, finally, someone developed a device and interface that sufficiently worked with my own programming, ie., iPhone.  

I tried others.  I bought a Velo when it was first available and sold it a couple days later, not only did I hate Windows Mobile with a passion the Velo single handedly ruined me for the “NetBook” buzz of today.  Windows-Only-Smaller was horrible and as an interface I’m of the opinion that Microsoft’s UI design concept peaked with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 as it was at least fairly stable by that time and the interface was not hidden behind a “start button” which has just never made an ounce of sense.  Start button’s on a coffee maker?  Brilliant.  “Start” to look for something that will hopefully lead you to something else that will get you hopefully to your intended application destination?  Ridiculous.

BlackBerry, I wasted some money there too.  The CrackBerry is, honestly, lost on me.  I don’t get it.  The jog-wheel is horrible.  It’s unusable for anything other than Pong. The trackball that was on a client provided 8820 I thought at least lent some interactivity to the device even though it really is just a glorified jog-wheel scrolling through the icons.    I always ended up going back to the trusty Treo 300 until it was no longer available and then to the 600 series.  And now PalmOS is dead, may God bless it’s soul.

To me, it seems that the user interface will forever be limited and, excluding simple familiarity as Steve mention, forever foreign to humanity until some sweet holographic stuff is possible.  The most significant lacking element of the interface is time and space. 

Think about it, any sense of depth, area, location, and time is essentially an illusion created by timestamp CRUD and graphics.  The user is abstracted by even these optical illusions via a flat visual portal and remote interactivity devices aka., your keyboard and mouse.  When I think of UI I think of how I live and interact with the physical world around me.  

In the real world an association of time and place is implicit with that of events, conversations, and actions which provide indicators for memory creation and retrieval.  These associations free my brain from requiring a hierarchically organized eidetic storage system. 

The human brain ingests more metadata than the actual object target, it would seem, and it does so in a way that object recall can be triggered by loose associative inter-connectivty with another human computer.  Sometimes, there is stuff we don’t know that we’ve even stored until someone else’s recall (direct or otherwise) triggers our own recollection - and the most important thing there is that we didn’t kick off a subroutine to select * from brain with some immense join or regex to match a random pattern.

And I’ll get back to this line of thought later.