I just finished reading Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton and found it to be very enlightening and an excellent read. I give it my highest recommendation for people interested in design.The book is about the art of sketching or creating very rough, throwaway models - on paper or in 3D - of devices and interfaces early in the design process. The book is also about "Holistic Design" by which Mr. Buxton means design that is a product of business, user experience, and technical considerations.
One of the themes early in the book, which really resonated with me personally, was the idea that computer software and device design is in a state of transition. Traditionally, the design of computer devices has been treated as separate consideration from the design of the software that runs on them - this is true even for the Apple Macintosh as pointed out in Buxton's book. However, as the devices and their software becoming more intimately connected (e.g. the iPhone and Microsoft Surface) this separation of concerns becomes less desirable.
In the future a clear separation between hardware and software will disappear so that it will be perceptually and technically impossible to determine exactly where industrial design ends and human-computer interface design begins.
This, in my opinion, is one of several concepts at the heart of Natural User Interfaces; the fact that the device and the software is indistinguishable. A user experience cannot, in my opinion, be NUI if the device and the software are easily distinguishable as is the case with modern personal computers today.
NUI is about making the user experience as natural as possible in terms of input and output when interacting with devices and software. If the user perceives a clear separation between the software and hardware than the natural effect is lost - they are too cognizant of the technology.
6 comments:
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
http://sketchingdrawing.com
Hi Susan,
Thanks for posting and the complement. I'm glad you enjoyed reading some of my posts.
I took a look at your web site - its great. Keep up the great work! I wish I could draw that well.
Richard
Long time reader of your blog here, Richard.
I wholeheartedly agree that the best human-computer interfaces (and by extension the best computer products) are achieved when the hardware and software are designed holistically. For me this is most clearly seen in the mobile device market, where for various reasons the forces for differentiation between products are stronger than the forces for consistency between them. For users, deeply differented, holistically designed devices like the iPhone and the Palm Pre are a great boon and a realization of the promise of "personal" computing. But as a mobile software developer this differentiation is called fragmentation, since it makes creating applications that are suited for a broad market of devices increasingly difficult and costly.
While holistically designed devices are doing a lot to humanize (or personalize) the personal computer, many developers fear that the continued proliferation of platforms will make it harder for healthy developer ecosystems to emerge around these varied platforms, eroding the greatest source of personalization: big, long-tailed catalogs of installable applications.
You've written about how Apple now has an almost unbeatable advantage with the iPhone app store, and surely you're right that ecosystem is key to market success. Consider the Palm Pre, with it's highly innovative and beautifully holistic design, which I consider to be a considerable improvement over the iPhone's (at least for the needs of a great many users). Palm webOS is a revelation, but to port an app from iPhone or Android is to begin from nothing--a tough sell for developers who have to consider their bottom line. Will Palm be able to grow the ecosystem needed to really make its products competitive? Or does the success of holistic design tend to reinforce the dominance of the first company that employs it successfully? If the latter, is that good for personal computing, particularly mobile computing, where different users have such different needs?
I don't believe I know the answer, but do believe there are powerful market realities that are in tension with your sweeping statement that the "separation between hardware and software will disappear." For example, wouldn't you agree that part of what makes the browser such a successful platform (for better or for worse) is the very fact that it separates hardware and software? True, browsers are evolving to reduce that separation, but to preserve enough of the unity of the web that makes it so useful and attracts such a huge ecosystem, that evolution cannot and will not be tied to any one device, however holistically designed.
I found this hugely interesting Michael Mace piece to be helpful in framing my own ponderings of the future of computing and I think it speaks to the tension I'm referring to.
Interested in your thoughts on all this!
Hi David,
thanks for the great comments and the pointer to that Michael Mace article - its a wonderful read and I highly recommend it.
With regard to the separation of software and hardware: Having kind of been there and done that with Java, I don't feel that developing platform agnostic applications (such as can be done with Java) makes any sense in the personal device market or in NUI in general.
The fact is that each device will offer a unique set of capabilities and specifications so that developing generalized software with he hope that it will port to many devices will require developing software to the lowest common denominator - this works OK with Java on the server side (although a lot platform specific tweaking is often needed) but for specialized devices I don't think it will work at all.
This is excellent fodder for a much longer post and I might do that.
I look forward to a longer post. Gartner sees Android overtaking iPhone and BlackBerry for mobile platform market share in the next 3 years, which certainly flies in the face of your prediction.
Personally, I think it's difficult to call because the competing forces of holistic design and openness are both such strong forces in the evolution of personal devices. All I can say is that when it comes to mobile technology I'm categorically skeptical of winner-takes-all propositions. Apple being what it is, I think it's not at all unlikely that the iPhone will become the Mac of mobile computing.
If you believe that Michael Mace's theory that the super-operating system or platform will be a combination of smart clients and cloud services than Gartner may be correct about android if Google (a) doesn't loose interest, (b) really does make a bunch of cloud services available, and (c) gets a handle on fragmentation.
The success of android depends in large part on the lack of fragmentation and the backing of Google. Java ME made many of the same promises as Android and in fact had huge penetration, but the market for Java ME applications was horrible and portability was really poor because every vendor implemented non-core aspects of Java ME differently.
I also think that the time frame that Gartner has predicted, two years, is a bit optimistic given the lack of focus with Android. iPhone had the advantage of holistic design and single source delivery which Android doesn't. I think the lack of a holistic design (both mobile framework and device) will cause Android to have a slower adoption curve.
Having said all that I am myself faced with the need to learn Android as one of my clients is focused on that platform for the future. So while I think iPhone has huge lead over Android, I'm less sure that its insurmountable.
That's the advantage of being a blogger and not a paid analyst (Which I was for 4 years by the way), I can change my mind without totally loosing face. ;-)
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