Posted By
Eric Anderson on 07/07/2010
I’ve
given up most of my dreams for the future. When I say “the future,” I mean, of
course, “The Future,” the grand
utopian vision of technological breakthroughs promised to me by the Weekly Reader, back in grade school in,
uh, the late seventies. I’ve abandoned
my plans to live as a seaweed farmer in my undersea biodome. I no longer expect
to be whisked to work on a high-speed moving sidewalk. I’ve had to settle for a
temperamental Roomba in place of a robot assistant. And I’m forced to clatter
away at a crude keyboard in order to convey this disappointment, rather than
beaming my thoughts to you through neural transmitters.
But I’ll
be damned if I’ll spend the next ten
years glumly clicking away at HTML pages as my main means of digital
interaction. Neil Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash, convinced me that my personal avatar, a studlier version
of myself, would be zipping around the Metaverse by now, doing meetings in
virtual pubs and crushing virtual beercans against my virtual forehead (my
memory of the novel is fuzzy). Come on, Internet, where’s my jetpack?!
I don’t
know about you, but I’m hankering for some new Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
models. It feels like we’re right on the
verge: mobile interactions are pushing the boundaries, touchscreen tablets
offer a whole new horizon, and Gesture Recognition models like Xbox’s Project
Natal could be a game-changer. But only if we as marketers and practitioners
challenge ourselves to challenge users to try new things. Otherwise we’ll be
building inverted hockey-stick navigations and driving users into the same
un-fun funnels for another generation.
We can
do better. We have the technology.
There
are two perfectly good reasons why inefficient technologies, like HTML or the
combustion engine, persist long, long after better technologies could replace
them: 1) momentum and 2) scale. Once a critical mass of people know how to use,
build, fix, and make money from a given technology, we take big risks when we
disrupt it. Just ask the folks at Second Life’s Linden Labs, which laid off 30%
of its staff in June.
Our fine
User Experience people remind us about heuristics—that users learn certain
conventions that we must design for. But those same UX folks also tell us that
good user experience principles, like top-down processing and redundancy, can
be applied to any new interface to make it easier for users to embrace. How
else did we all learn the iPod overnight? There were barely any instructions.
Today we
have plenty of ways to push the digital boundaries short of flipping the switch
on a virtual world. We can insist on mobile versions of every new Web
experience we create. We can create unique experiences for tablets that take
advantage of touch and motion. We can experiment with Augmented Reality
wherever location comes into play. We can all buy Project Natal and dabble in
gesture recognition til we drop. Which you know you wanted to do anyway—this
way, it’s a tax write-off.
At White
Horse we're doing our bit by developing a HCI lab onsite so we can keep these
new interfaces front-and-center. Many of these interfaces will never go big—anyone
care to purchase a lightly used Newton?—but others will evolve into the future,
or possibly even The Future, of digital interactions.
I mean
it, Internet. I want to be dazzled. Let’s see what you can do.
Tags: Web Design, Interface Development, User Research
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