What if instead of designing explicit interfaces we aimed instead at eliminating them altogether? If instead of adding a screen we found ways to remove it? Wouldn’t the best user interface be the one that requires nothing of the user?
No UI, proposed here on the Journal by Cooper’s Golden Krishna, is interesting, provocative, and deeply flawed. Golden argues that no interface is best, and then explores ways strip it out. But this begins with a designer’s goal rather than the users’. First identify where users are helped or hindered by explicit interfaces: When hindered, eliminate the UI. But there's many times when a UI really helps. When it does, make it great.
But where to start? Three questions can help you evaluate the user’s relationship with a task, product or service.
For any particular interface in the system:
Does the user want or need control?
Does the user get value from doing the work themselves?
Does the user outperform technology?
If you can answer “no” to every one of these questions, then put in the effort to eliminate the interface. If you answer “yes” to any one of these you should focus on improving the interface so that it supports the user better. If it’s not unanimously “yes” or “no” carefully consider how design can meet the conflicting needs. Get to know your users well. Design a solution that’s as sophisticated and nuanced as their situation calls for.
Each of these questions helps you examine the relationship of the user with the technology. These are massively important considerations when advocating for the elimination of the interface; a product without some form of interface effectively doesn’t exist for the user. The UI is the embodiment of your relationship with it. No interface, no relationship. Sometimes this is exactly what you want. But people also value products because they bring something into their lives, or because they remove some obstacle from it. Every tool, game, or service gives people power, information, peace, pleasure, or possibility. Interactions with these should be awesome, helpful, supportive, effortless; and for this we often need a really great UI.
Whew. That was close. As every year, there’s a risk that we’ll be overrun with with zombies, werewolves, vampires, sasquatch(es), and mummies before the veil that separates the world seals tight for another year. But a quick tally around the Cooper offices shows that here, at least, we all made it. Hope all our readers are yet un-undead as well. While we’re taking this breather, we’re called to reflect a bit on this year’s interaction design for monsters.
Monsters are extreme personas
One of the power of personas is that they encourage designers to be more extrospective, to stop designing for themselves. Monsters as personas push this to an extreme. It’s rare that you’ll ever be designing technology for humans who can’t perceive anything, can’t speak any modern language, live nearly eternally, shape shift, etc. But each of these outrageous constraints challenges designers to create a design that could accommodate it, and often ends up driving what’s new or special about the design.
But then again...
Some of the constraints of the monsters are human constraints writ large (or writ strangely).
Juan wasn’t a useful person in and of himself, but his users exercised flash mob requirements of real-time activation and coordination. Are there flash mob lessons to learn?
Emily was fighting a zombie infection, but real-world humans are fighting infections all the time. Is there something we can use for medical interfaces?
Metanipsah has no modern language and a mechanical mental model, but most of us have mobile wayfinding needs at one time or another.
The Vampire Capitalists behind Genotone took the long view, reminding us of burgeoning post-growth business models.
So maybe they’re great personas after all, guiding us to great design because they’re extreme, just like the canonical OXO Good Grips story, where designing for people with arthritis led the design teams to create products with universal appeal.
It was a full house of design thinkers with a Silicon Valley twist. Serial Entrepreneurs. Voice-activation specialists. Tech wunderkinds. An evening of passionate discussion about the future of interfaces.
“I felt like I was back in college — the good parts of college,” Strava designer Peter Duyan told me afterwards.
Peter was crammed in this room of college-like discourse — designed for 35, now seating over 60 — because of a blog post I wrote that went unexpectedly viral.
I had proposed that “the best interface is no interface.” That we should focus on experiences and problems, not on screens. That UX is not UI. Two days after it was published, it was shared more on Twitter than anything ever written on The Cooper Journal, Core77 or Designer Observer. A week later, a Breaking Development podcast. Two weeks, a popular Branch discussion. A month, top ten on Hacker News again. All surprising, flattering, amazing. And that evening, a conversation.
In the spirit of discourse, special guest and design legend Don Norman started the evening with an entertaining retort: “They made a big mistake when they invited me.” (Watch it above, or listen to it here. And if you haven’t read his books, you should).
Then, in 1984, Apple adopted Xerox PARC’s WIMP — window, icon, menu, pointer — and took us a galactic leap forward away from those horrifying command lines of DOS, and into a world of graphical user interfaces.
We were converted. And a decade later, when we could touch the Palm Pilot instead of dragging a mouse, we were even more impressed. But today, our love for the digital interface has gotten out-of-control.
It’s become the answer to every design problem.
How do you make a better car? Slap an interface in it.
A giant touchscreen with news and weather is exactly what’s missing from my hotel stay. (Source: IDEO)
Creative minds in technology should focus on solving problems. Not just make interfaces.
As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.”
It’s time for us to move beyond screen-based thinking. Because when we think in screens, we design based upon a model that is inherently unnatural, inhumane, and has diminishing returns. It requires a great deal of talent, money and time to make these systems somewhat usable, and after all that effort, the software can sadly, only truly improve with a major overhaul.
There is a better path: No UI. A design methodology that aims to produce a radically simple technological future without digital interfaces. Following three simple principles, we can design smarter, more useful systems that make our lives better.
Principle 1: Eliminate interfaces to embrace natural processes.
Severalcar companies have recently created smartphone apps that allow drivers to unlock their car doors. Generally, the unlocking feature plays out like this:
A driver approaches her car.
Takes her smartphone out of her purse.
Turns her phone on.
Slides to unlock her phone.
Enters her passcode into her phone.
Swipes through a sea of icons, trying to find the app.
Taps the desired app icon.
Waits for the app to load.
Looks at the app, and tries figure out (or remember) how it works.
Makes a best guess about which menu item to hit to unlock doors and taps that item.
Taps a button to unlock the doors.
The car doors unlock.
She opens her car door.
Thirteen steps later, she can enter her car.
The app forces the driver to use her phone. She has to learn a new interface. And the experience is designed around the flow of the computer, not the flow of a person.
If we eliminate the UI, we’re left with only three, natural steps:
A driver approaches her car.
The car doors unlock.
She opens her car door.
Anything beyond these three steps should be frowned upon.
Seem crazy? Well, this was solved by Mercedes-Benz in 1999. Please watch the first 22 seconds of this incredibly smart (but rather unsexy) demonstration:
By reframing design constraints from the resolution of the iPhone to our natural course of actions, Mercedes created an incredibly intuitive, and wonderfully elegant car entry. The car senses that the key is nearby, and the door opens without any extra work.
That’s good design thinking. After all, especially when designing around common tasks, the best interface is no interface.
Another example.
A few companies, including Google, have built smartphone apps that allow customers to pay merchants using NFC. Here’s the flow:
A shopper enters a store.
Orders a sandwich.
Takes his smartphone out of his pocket.
Turns his phone on.
Slides to unlock.
Enters his passcode into the phone.
Swipes through a sea of icons, trying to find the Google Wallet app.
Taps the desired app icon.
Waits for the app to load.
Looks at the app, and tries figure out (or remember) how it works.
Makes a best guess about which menu item to hit to to reveal his credit cards linked to Google Wallet. In this case, “payment types.”
Swipes to find the credit card his would like to use.
Taps that desired credit card.
Finds the NFC receiver near the cash register.
Taps his smartphone to the NFC receiver to pay.
Sits down and eats his sandwich.
If we eliminate the UI, we’re again left with only three, natural steps:
A shopper enters a store.
Orders a sandwich.
Sits down and eats his sandwich.
Asking for an item to a person behind a register is a natural interaction. And that’s all it takes to pay with Auto Tab in Pay with Square. Start at 2:08:
Auto Tab in Pay with Square does require some UI to get started. But by using location awareness behind-the-scenes, the customer doesn’t have to deal with UI, and can simply pursue his natural course of actions.
As Jack Dorsey of Square explains above, “NFC is another thing you have to do. It’s another action you have to take. And it’s not the most human action to wave a device around another device and wait for a beep. It just doesn’t feel right.”
Principle 2: Leverage computers instead of catering to them.
No UI is about machines helping us, instead of us adapting for computers.
With UI, we are faced with counterintuitive interaction methods that are tailored to the needs of a computer. We are forced to navigate complex databases to obtain simple information. We are required to memorize countless passwords with rules like one capital letter, two numbers and a punctuation mark. And most importantly, we’re constantly pulled away from the stuff we actually want to be doing.
A Windows 2000 password requirement. (Source: Microsoft)
By embracing No UI, the design focuses on your needs. There’s no interface for the sake of interface. Instead, computers are catered to you.
Your car door unlocks when you walk up to it. Your TV turns on to the channel you want to watch. Your alarm clock sets itself, and even wakes you up at the right REM moment.
Even your car lets you know when something is wrong:
When we let go of screen-based thinking, we design purely to the needs of a person. Afterall, good experience design isn’t about good screens, it’s about good experiences.
Principle 3: Create a system that adapts for people.
I know, you’re great.
You’re a unique, amazingly complex individual, filled with your own interests and desires.
So building a great UI for you is hard. It takes open-minded leaders, great research, deep insights...let’s put it this way: it’s challenging.
So why are companies spending millions of dollars simply to make inherently unnatural interfaces feel somewhat natural for you? And even more puzzling, why do they continue to do so, when UI often has a diminishing rate of return?
Think back to when you first signed up for Gmail. Once you discovered innovative features like conversation view, you were hugely rewarded. But over time, the rate of returns have diminished. The interface has become stale.
Sadly, the obvious way for Google to give you another leap forward is to have its designers and engineers spend an incredible amount of time and effort to redesign. And when they do, you will be faced with the pain of learning how to interact with the new interface; some things will work better for you, and some things will be worse for you.
Alternatively, No UI systems focus on you. These systems aren’t bound by the constraints of screens, but instead are able to organically and rapidly grow to fit your needs.
They think of themselves as a service, not a software company or an app-maker. That’s an important mind set which is lost on many startups today. It means they serve people, not screens.
After you sign up for Trunk Club, you have an introductory conversation with a stylist. Then, they send your first trunk of clothes. What you like, you keep. What you don’t like, you send back. Based on your returns and what you keep, Trunk Club learns more and more about you, giving you better and better results each time.
Diminishing rate of return over time? Nay, increasing returns.
Without a bulky UI, it’s easier to become more and more relevant. For fashion, the best interface is no interface.
Another company focused on adapting to your needs is Nest.
When I first saw Nest, I thought they had just slapped an interface on a thermometer and called it “innovation.”
As time passes, the need to use Nest’s UI diminishes. (Source: YouTube)
But there’s something special about the Nest thermostat: it doesn’t want to have a UI.
Nest studies you. It tracks when you wake up. What temperatures you prefer over the course of the day. Nest works hard to eliminate the need for its own UI by learning about you.
Haven’t I heard this before?
The foundation for No UI has been laid by countless other members of the design community.
In 1988, Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC coined “ubiquitous computing.” In 1995, this was part of his abstract on Calm Technology:
“The impact of technology will increase ten-fold as it is imbedded in the fabric of everyday life. As technology becomes more imbedded and invisible, it calms our lives by removing annoyances while keeping us connected with what is truly important.”
“...Norman shows why the computer is so difficult to use and why this complexity is fundamental to its nature. The only answer, says Norman, is to start over again, to develop information appliances that fit people's needs and lives.”
In 1999, Kevin Ashton gave a talk about “The Internet of Things.” His words:
“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.”
Today, we finally have the technology to achieve a lot of these goals.
This past year, Amber Case talked about Weiser-inspired location awareness.
There’s a lot we can achieve with some of our basic tools today.
Let’s keep talking.
Oh, there’s so much more to say:
Watch the Cooper Parlor. After this essay exploded on Twitter, Cooper hosted a No UI event with special guest, design legend Donald Norman.
Listen to "The best interface is no interface" at SXSW. Thanks for reading this essay, tweeting about it, and generously pressuring SXSW to accept this talk. Thanks to you, I will be speaking about "The best interface is no interface" at SXSW 2013.
Follow the No UI Tumblr. I'm collecting more case studies, more examples and articles about the technology that can help us eliminate the interface on Tumblr. Get inspired at nointerface.tumblr.com
Comment below. Where do you see No UI opportunities?
Special thanks: to everyone at Cooper and all those who have helped, particularly Stefan Klocek, Chris Noessel, Doug LeMoine and Meghan Gordon.
Corrections: the original version of this article referred to "Pay with Square" as "Pay by Square", incorrectly stated the published date of "The Invisible Computer" and cited Adam Greenfield.
Defining and creating a memorable experience for your customers is no easy task. Product owners and development teams can easily rattle off ideas to designers about what features are necessary to stay competitive. But if you ask them to share their vision for the overall more subtle emotional aspects of the experience, they often get quiet or resort to the familiar old UI clichés of "simplicity, intuitiveness, etc." This means that you often start your design work with less insight than you need to drive visual and interaction design.
Enter the experience workshop - a collaborative meeting and setup where clients can really talk about what a great experience can feel like among a sea of inspirational images, digital interfaces, products, services, brands, cars, textures, and more. Companies that build digital products and services are engaging in a new level of competition; it's no longer good enough to deliver a usable product. Our designs must reach an aspirational vision that elevates the experience beyond mere usability, and a visual, collaborative workshop pushes people to explore and discuss the possibilities.
The workshop helps teams discuss what attributes are inherent in these other experiences that are meaningful to the experience they're defining. After a process of prioritization and discussion, the end result is often a huge cloud of ideas and words that sit on a spectrum from a poor experience to an ideal experience. The examples aren't what's important for our output. We collect insight from the discussion, the words, that help us define the ideal experience.
The workshop brings teams together to learn and collaborate on the experience. What I love most about this activity is the connections made from people across different teams that can relate on a personal level because of their shared experiences. It's not just a visioning exercise for the future; it's a team-building event.
Check out the above video to see a glimpse of the workshop in action. And if you want to learn more about how to conduct a workshop and integrate this new approach into your company, you can sign up for an upcoming Cooper U Visual Interface Design course. In fact, we have just a few spots left in next week's class (May 7-8), if this post left you inspired...
Let's presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.
Like any piece of good advice, your organization must be able to hear the design and then act on it for it to do any good. Take a look at this checklist to see if your organization is design ready.
The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's 2012 Web Conference was held in San Francisco and attended by publishers, editors, and owners from over 130 of North America's alternative news organizations. Stefan Klocek spoke about how alternative news organizations can bring their content to the emerging platform of tablets in "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" session. He highlighted unique qualities of the tablet for local news consumption and gave an overview of how organizations with a cultivated and established brand presence can deeply engage with their audience. View Stefan's presentation below or download it.
The World Series is barely over, which means most of my thoughts this time of year get colored by baseball. Events in game five got me thinking about design exploration, of all things. I'll try not stretch the metaphor too much.
I work throughout the year with product managers, technologists, and executives at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 megaliths. Many of these companies have a vision for creating a game-changing product within their industry, “the iPhone of the xyz market.” They mean it, too. But as conversations progress and a project plan begins to take shape, many of the project owners start piling on technology constraints before any design work has even begun.
“We need to use these off-the-shelf components.”
“Don't explore any solutions that won't let us use our current technology platform.”
“Actually, what we really need is just a facelift of the presentation layer.”
Not exactly the words I imagine Steve Jobs used to drive the creation of the iPod and iPhone.
Sometimes this slow degradation of vision is a result of poor or conflicting communication...which brings me back to last night's baseball game. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, already a two-time World Series winner and owner of the most wins by an active manager, had a vision for which pitchers he wanted to be warmed up in the late innings of a tight ballgame. He called the bullpen coach (using a land-line telephone in the dugout), and, amazingly, not once but twice, the bullpen coach misheard LaRussa's instructions and warmed up the wrong pitcher.
I don't know if that's happened before in a World Series game, but in the corporate world, we see the wrong product get sent into the game all the time. Executives have a vision for the future, but don't clearly articulate it to the product owners (other than specifying a deadline which is often arbitrary and not tied to actual work milestones), so what gets built isn't visionary at all but driven by the calendar...which means introducing lots of constraints from the beginning. The result may be an incrementally better product, but not a game changer.
We like the saying “reality bats last,” one of Alan Cooper's original design principles. For us that means for any design we create to actually be a solution, it needs to be buildable by our client. It has to live within their unique technology, price, deadline, and resource constraints. However, we have been pushing more and more for the opportunity with our clients to do at least some unfettered, unconstrained design exploration on every project, even ones that have a narrow scope. We don't completely ignore constraints (especially things like regulations which are out of our client's control), and we won't explore designs that rely on telekinesis or nuclear fission, of course. That said, we will definitely push the envelope on what's possible—for a few days or even up to a week—so we can begin with the mindset of the absolute best experience for the user. Over the course of the project we'll push to achieve as much of this game-changing vision as we can.
Allow some your design team to let their imaginations run wild before they get saddled with constraints. (photo by Peter Duyan)
Typically, the output of this design exploration is a collection of hand-drawn sketches that target key plot points in the most important scenarios, and signature interactions (parts of the system fundamental to the experience). The sketches often explore a range of ideas, some that can be implemented within all known constraints, but also others which may bend (or break) constraints. After that, it's really a business decision our clients need to make about how to proceed. Sometimes it makes sense to restructure deadlines, add resource, buy a technology, or abandon a legacy infrastructure to get that “killer app.” Other times it doesn't make sense...but as designers it's our job to imagine the future and enable business decision makers to make the most informed decision they can.
Which brings me back to baseball. You are the manager of your company: what's your strategy? Reality is a heavy hitter, but it shouldn't bat in every slot in your lineup. Can you really afford to play it safe every game? Even if your competition is miles behind, spending time to imagine a better future for your product will position your company to more nimbly take your offering to the next level when constraints go away.
And while you are at it, I would recommend upgrading those bullpen phones. Read More
Design research has been a key component of most of the projects I've been involved with at Cooper. Since it adds time and cost, sometimes we have to go to great lengths to convince clients to include research in a project. But design research isn't just about giving the design and product team a leg up on understanding user goals and needs. It's also about minimizing business risk and validating—or challenging—the current strategy. Typically, the insights we gain by talking with and observing users help our clients look at their business goals through a different lens. In addition to providing necessary input for designing successful products and services, this new perspective helps them make better decisions about the long-term trajectory of their product roadmap and approach. For some products and companies, it can be even more transformative, as the insights they gain help them re-imagine not only how to design and deliver better products, but also how to better structure their internal organization to do so.
Of course, companies can only make these kind of strategic pivots if they have the appropriate decision-makers engaged in the initiative, with time set aside in their decision-making process for integrating the input that may come out of user research. I've found that the business executives who treat design initiatives as a strategic endeavor and not just a tactical execution of product definition get much more value for their design dollar.
Cooper is proud to announce design strategy expert Indi Young will be coming to our studio on November 14 to lead a one-day workshop in techniques for creating mental model diagrams.
Understanding users' workflows and work environments is key to developing appropriate products and services, but to really create an experience users love, you have to understand how they think. Indi Young has pioneered techniques for getting at these key understandings during user interviews, and for translating that understanding into powerful communication pieces called mental model diagrams.
The workshop gives users hands-on experience in the process she describes in her book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Creating winning design solutions starts with the mantra, "Know thy user." This means more than just identifying users' workflows and work environments; it means understanding how they think.
This one-day workshop will reveal how to capture the thought processes and intentions of your audience into a simple and persuasive mental model diagram, and how to use that diagram to steer the course of your organization immediately and for the long term.
Participation is limited to 20 attendees, so register now! Read More
