From Lean UX to continuous integration, our processes for generating new ideas are increasingly driven by analytics and usage stats. What allows us to navigate the murky waters of uncertain custom resonance is the intangible skill of vision making; visions that exist only in pixels. Rather than capturing value through physical objects, we're gaining premium prices for services, and, increasingly, experiences. But there's also a dark-side to the disruption spurred by the collusion of design and technology.
Are designers responsible for the impact of their work upon human behavior?
Is it actually possible to create "connected" experiences across devices?
Do designers need to speed up, or do stakeholders need to slow down?
(And thanks to SapientNitro for the opportunity to meet such interesting people, expand my own perspective, and make use of what I learned on my high school debate team. Ha!)
Two talks convinced me that automation will play an increasing role in our lives. From an engineering perspective, Amit Kapur and Jeff Bonforte explained the powerful robot applications that run within our phones, our cars, and our houses. From a design perspective, former Cooperista Golden Krishna shared the design principles that might throttle us toward more interfaces-less interactions. Now three scenarios to highlight the difference between the human, the machine, and the automaton:
It used to be the case that we understood computation as a representation of the real world around us. It was used to model effectiveness of bombs, cities, or patterns of life. But that has flipped. Now the physical world around us is an instantiation of a digital source. Our source used to be an analog, in the case of photography, a negative. The source is no longer analog atoms, but rather a digital master. This is the first of a three part series. Follow the rest of the conversation in part 2 and part 3.
Austin, March 11, 2:50pm: You're staring at your phone, desperately trying to figure out the most appropriate, break-through, next-level place you could possibly go. But you're also moving, your feet propel you forward guided by the over flowing list of lives you could be living at 3:00pm today. Welcome to the crowd of SXSW'13, a hoard of nerds, some of whom you've highlighted as potential friendships, contacts, and maybe something more. Jumping to your other compass, the twitter-sphere, you search for what's good in the last 2 minutes. Expo G? You've got a good 10 minute walk. It starts to rain, and you see a swarm of folks donning red ponchos with a line emerging behind them. Just in time, you happily wear a url in exchange for a dry walk to the next venue. Despite bumping into other tilted head walkers, you find yourself in a massive conference room, ready to be inspired, snap an instagram, and grab some quotable references for your tumblr later on. Halfway through the talk, it hits you: 'what's next?' You pull out your shiny glass master and realize 4:00pm promises 13 potential futures. The notion gives you pause. Imagine, what would SXSW be without the net? No digital schedule, website swag, no live tweeting, no ambient cloud of intent. Just a room with a bunch of people talking. For better or for worse, our reality has flipped, what was once a world of physical things organized by people, is now a world of digital things augmented by people. We look down for orientation, and up for verification. I'd like to share with you how SXSW taught me to stop worrying and learn to love the new master.
The digital master of the built environment
Making plastic junk is now a digital pursuit. One of the first unveilings at SXSW was a consumer level 3D scanner. A couple of years ago the makerbot was released with a promise to disrupt how real things are made. The cycle is now complete with the ability to scan an object into a digital mesh. The mesh can then be modified and printed out to a new plastic object. This is consumer level! For the price of a PC in 93, you can purchase a 3D scanner and printer.
The demo object (scanned and printed) was a garden gnome, once of many crapjects waiting to happen.
By Dr. Matthew Powers (Carnegie Mellon University)
We make robots that mimic human bodies to do the 3D jobs (dirty, dull, and dangerous – ex. strip mining), but there is so much more potential in intelligent machines than just this. As designers, we need to take a step back and think about the design implications of robots and intelligent machines working in our world.
We already have robots in our houses.
Nest learning thermostat is a robot. This product is a perfect example of cooperation between robotics and designers. it is intelligent and well designed so the user isn't obligated to manually input data.
Call for action for Designers:
We need to move from solving robotics problems to solving problems with robotics.
Robotics provides tools. Design grounds robotics into practical problem and brings a more human approach to a field that is by definition inhuman
At the end of the talk, Dr. Powers threw out this doozy:
Will it be the role of designers, engineers, and/or policy-makers to decide the “ethics” of robots? Who decides how an automated car would make the choice between hitting a bus full of children or a pedestrian?
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).
Just as the Internet powerhouses of the early 2000’s were all but forgotten, they rise with new panache. MySpace, Digg, and now AOL have undergone massive redesigns in an attempt to lure in former users, and it just might work.
Remember the race to get your favorite @gmail.com address? OMG - a GB of free storage!? Forget that hotmail email address you’ve been using since your days backpacking around Europe after college, time to switch domains. What a hassle.
Those days are over. Today, cloud storage is effectively free. The key players (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) have taken data center construction to an art form, along the way making that same infrastructure a commodity. The result: the back-end is no longer a differentiator and companies are increasingly turning to front-end innovation to make a splash.
AOL’s new web-based email client, Alto, is an interesting new tool for managing the inbox fire hose. Among other nifty features, it analyzes your inbox and automatically categorizes your email into piles like daily deals, attachments, and social notifications - the new breed of “pseudo-spam.” Unlike the days of yore, you don’t have to go through the hassle of migrating from Gmail or Yahoo to take advantage of these new superpowers. Alto is just a new layer of svelteness on top of the old email infrastructure.
This series of posts and the subsequent Cooper PUB talk on October 25th are meant to get designers thinking about new approaches to their everyday workflow. The PUB is sold out, but we invite remote participation through Branch on the same evening. To be invited to Branch, add your name to the waitlist here and we’ll send you an invitation.
When computers and digital technology came onto the scene, a design revolution was born. Thanks to the advantages of the new digital workstream, the possibilities for our creativity expanded exponentially. But, given the complexity of learning the new programs that are available to us, many of us now find ourselves locked into a single toolset (read: Photoshop), afraid to try something different. As a result, our workflows are inefficient and not oriented to working effectively in teams.
The goal is to be creative A well designed workflow cuts down your stress and increases your focus, allowing more time for what you want to do most: be creative.
Creativity starts with ideas. The creative process is more than just finding the right tool for the job; it’s also about finding the best approach to being creative. Starting in the computer pushes designers down the path of putting the pixel first and the concept second. Instead, I find paper to be the best way to explore and develop a range of ideas.
A quick exercise I use to the get the juices flowing is to start sketching ideas in quick 5 minute sprints. I focus on generating as many different ideas as quickly as possible, then expand on those ideas. This is best done on paper so you think about the concept rather than the design.
Sketching is a critical part of your workflow so don’t ignore it. Drawing stencils play a big part of my process and are instrumental in helping me get ideas down on paper. I especially find circles, straighlings, curvers, and squares useful, which you can find at any local art store. If you’re a mobile application designer, check out the UI Stencils for iphone, android, and w8 interfaces. You’ll thank me later.
Finding inspiration As an illustration major in college, my professor implored his students to start a reference library of interesting photos, textures, colors, and whatever else we found interesting. The idea was to create a massive library of photo references that you could refer back to if you needed to draw a sports car, a pine tree, or a leather jacket for example.
Growing as a designer means keeping up with the ever-shifting trends and visual innovations out there in the world, and a library of inspiration can be a useful tool to stockpile inspirational art and help to spark your creativity.
Inspired efficiency As a visual designer, I've extended the idea of maintaining a reference library and started an asset library of Photoshop files, Fireworks files, icons, vectors, textures, brushes, swatches, fonts and whatever else I find useful. The idea is to curate a collection of elements so that you spend less time searching in the future.
Just about anything can inspire visual creativity. Don't just limit yourself to obvious things like icons or UI elements; branch out and explore non-digital works like paintings and illustrations. Over the years I've collected thousands of interesting and inspiring artifacts, including fonts, photographs, textures, color palettes, and even code snippets.
Here are some places I go when I want to find new material for my library:
Tools of the trade If you’re looking to start your own digital asset library, I recommend giving Pixa App a try. It’s a promising new application for maintaining an asset library. Pixa supports all the file types I use as a designer: Photoshop, Illustration, EPS, PDF and Fireworks files. Additionally, the fact that Pixa works with dropbox makes it an ideal tool for sharing assets with other team members.
As my collection grew, however, it became increasingly difficult to maintain it and keep it useful. Enter Evernote. Evernote excels at nearly everything I was looking for in a digital asset management application: it makes content collection, tagging, and sharing a snap. But Evernote's secret awesomeness is in search: it can instantly find text not only in tags, titles, and notes, but also, using very accurate OCR, within the images themselves.
Tell us what you think I hope your take away from this post is that understanding your workflow is just as important as understanding your tools. The approaches I’ve shared are simple ones, but they’ve made a big difference in my own design process. Give them a try, and share your favorite tools and methods for working smarter, not harder, in the comments or on the Cooper PUB Facebook Page. And, don’t forget to add your name to the waitlist if you’d like to be part of the Cooper PUB branch conversation on October 25th.
(Stay tuned for part 2 of this series next Wednesday, October 10th).
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.
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.
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