Minority Report-style interface comes of age

I'm a sucker for new user interfaces. I've written about them before here and here and here.

When anybody talks about the future of the UI, they always end up referencing Minority Report – in fact, the section with Tom Cruise in front of a fully 3D interface responding to his gestures is probably the most memorable in the film (or is that just me?).

Now, John Underkoffler, the man who helped create the interface in Minority Report, is on TED demonstrating a working prototype. It's pretty smart and I want one.

Of course, as we move to these kind of interfaces (and even the more pedestrian reconfigurable ones we have now) the job of information architects and user experience experts will become both massively more complex and, I'd argue, more interesting.

Is UX too passive?

This week I spent an enjoyable and illuminating Monday at a new event, UX People run by the lovely folks at Zebra People.

While I am not a user experience professional, it's good to hear the latest thinking.

It strikes me that everyone in UX is pretty much in the same boat. It is still an evolving discipline. And beyond the high level principles of getting to know your users and watching what they do etc, the specifics of how to do UX really well are open to debate.

Of course, for many in the industry, this is what excites them about it.

One of the coffee-break debates was around the relationship between UX and marketing. Some were talking about a recent blog post (which I think is this one) and taking radically opposing sides.

For me UX and marketing are virtually inseparable. Even if we're talking about non-profits and informational sites, at some level we are still selling an idea or a course of action. It might not be marketing in the strictly commercial sense, but it is marketing all the same.

UX or UB?

When I think of user experience, I tend to view it as a method for getting out of the way of users. It removes barriers to getting stuff done. Makes actions intuitive.

This is all very noble and certainly fits with the user-centred cluetrain-focused social media world we now live in. But, as someone from the marketing side of the fence, I want to change how people act.

So for me, it's less about user experience and more about user behaviour.

Of course the two aren't – and shouldn't be – mutually exclusive. But as soon as we focus on changing behaviour, it becomes less about getting out of the way of users and more about encouraging a series of actions. Less about the nuts and bolts of a clear and consistent navigation, eye-lead and all that good stuff. More about a compelling user journey,  an engaging story and effective persuasion.

To be clear, I am not advocating a return to old-school interruption-based communication. No one is served by poor UX. I am, however, saying that we shouldn't be shy of trying to shape people's behaviour. And UX can have a massive role to play.




Rules for computing happiness

Minimal (one of my new favourite sites) links to a list of rules by Alex Payne for computing happiness. Alex splits them into software, hardware and file formats. It's pretty comprehensive and IMHO hard to disagree with. Some that I violently agree with include (my comments in italics):

• Do not use software that does many things poorly.
• Use a plain text editor that you know well.  Not a word processor, a plain text editor — I have been trying to move to something other than Word for ages now, the problem is having to share stuff with other people and deal with Tracked Changes. I like Pages as a word processor although it's save as function is just plain petulant and I like Bean as a text editor but until everyone saves everything in RTF, it's going to be a tricky one
• Use a password manager. You shouldn’t know any of your passwords save the one to your primary email account and the one to your password manager — Personally, I prefer Pastor but each to their own
• Pay for software that’s worth paying for, but only after evaluating it for no less than two weeks — I so agree with this, the software that looks good on first inspection but which later becomes simply hard drive ballast is legion.
• Use a Mac for personal computing.
• The only peripheral you absolutely need is a hard disk or network drive to put backups on.
• Buy as large an external display as you can afford if you’ll be working on the computer for more than three hours at a time.

The ones I'm less sure on:

• Do not use software that must sync over the internet to function — I generally agree with the exception of Dropbox which simply makes my life so much easier.
• Do not use software that isn’t made specifically for your operating system. (You’ll know it when you see it because it won’t look right or work correctly) — with the explosion of stable, useful Air-based apps I'm not sure this is a deal breaker any more.
• Do not run beta software unless you know how to submit a bug report and are eager to do so — this is where I come unstuck. I love beta software. A big part of computing happiness for me is trying new stuff. Of course, I'm not so good at uninstalling it when I get bored later.

Take a look at the full list (plus Minimal's additions), it's interesting stuff.

The iPad experience

It seems like an eternity since the iPad was announced – rather than the couple of weeks it's actually been. This is partly due to the fact that so many of us have been waiting so long, read so many rumours, seen so many 'prototypes'. It's also down to the gigs of commentary that have hit the web since the launch.

The overall verdict seems to be that the iPad sucks. It doesn't have this feature and that feature, it won't multi-task etc. (Similar to the verdicts on the iPod and the iPhone when they launched.)

All valid from a technophile's point of view. And all completely irrelevant to the iPad's chances of commercial success.

The iPad is not about technology. It's about experience. Pure and simple.

The iPad will succeed if it captivates people's imagination – if it conveys a compelling story about how we will all use these kinds of devices in future.

When you watch the launch video and Steve Jobs and co's presentation, it's a story about intimacy. It's about the removal of barriers between the user and the device. No keyboard. No mouse. Touch and gestures. This is the really important thing.

While the launch video is interesting, the best example I've found of what the iPad experience is likely to be like (and what it may evolve into) comes from BonnierR&D in a video created with design company BERG (a month before the iPad launched BTW). They present where the evolution of the magazine is heading and show a possible user experience.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it incredibly seductive. See what you think.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Visionary stuff from Microsoft

Microsoft has put up a range of future-gazing videos that look at what the computing environments of tomorrow will/could look like. They make a lot of multitouch (which I've blogged about before here, here and here). They also echo the futuristic interfaces that Adaptive Path have been exploring. And digital paper also makes an appearance.

They really are beautifully put together, telling compelling stories without any voice over or "at Microsoft, we believe..." kind of rubbish.

Now, if only they could deliver a fraction of what they are showing, then they'd really be onto something and leave the likes of Apple floundering behind.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

You can see others in the series here.