Thursday August 21, 2008

Automate this!

by Matt Donovan in Article

2 comments

I recently heard Dennis Wixon of Microsoft Surface speak at UX Week about the future of interface design. He described touch screens and gestural interfaces as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). Moving my fingers around a piece of glass or plastic doesn’t strike me as particularly natural, but I understand the premise. That is, we’re moving from the GUI – where we do things through proxy, like dragging objects with a mouse, to a more natural environment where we eliminate mice and keyboards and interact directly with the interface.

By looking past the current required action and designing for the end result, we will identify more opportunities for anticipation.

Wixon predicts technology will soon anticipate and deliver what we want without us having to ask. The idea of wearing an RFID tag everywhere so computers can collect data about my behavior in order to anticipate what I want is unsettling. I’m a little more comfortable with the idea of my refrigerator ordering groceries for me, but that seems a ways off yet. I’m a fan of small attainable improvements, so I find technology that anticipates my behavior based on basic, general information to be the more exciting part of this.

A Few Examples

Naoto Fukasawa is cited as saying “the best designs are those that dissolve into behavior.” This idea plus Wixon’s prediction has got me thinking about the things in my life that could anticipate my behavior just a little bit better:

• Motion lights are nothing new. Most of our offices here have them. I walk into a room and, after a second or so, the lights blink on. The technology reacts to my entering the room. What if the effect was anticipatory? More like a doorman who sees me coming and opens the door as I approach? What if the motion sensor was on the doorway and the lights faded on just before I stepped into the room? When I leave, the lights could fade off. This could all be handled with motion sensors. I don’t know how high-tech heat sensors are, but that’s an option too I suppose.

• I hate automatic paper towel dispensers. Waving may hand back and forth in front of that thing is only slightly less annoying than turning a crank. The basic dispenser with no sensors or cranks is best … assuming it’s stocked. Since most public faucets are automatic, why not tie the dispenser sensor in with the faucet sensor? If I put my hands under the faucet, I’m going to need a towel, right? The dispenser could anticipate that and feed out a towel when the water turns on. No hand waving, no cranks – just grab a towel.

• Why do I have to push a button to open my garage door when I come home? Seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to use bluetooth or something to let my car and the garage door talk to each other so that the door just opens as I approach the house. As far as I can tell, there’s not a whole lot on this subject yet. I realize pushing a button is a little silly to complain about (as is flipping a light switch or waving my hand for that matter). However, my garage door opener is not currently working so I feel justified in having this on my mind.

We can move past a switch, a button, or even a required gesture because we’re not focused on turning on the light, we’re focused on enabling sight. We’re not focusing on dispensing a towel or opening a garage. The design goals provide an opportunity to dry your hands and park your a car. Which, in retrospect, sounds like a peculiar sequence of events.

Narrowing The Gap

The web browser still requires clicking. Even in a NUI, a person has to tap the screen. Digesting information has required an interface for so long (since hieroglyphics) that it’s difficult to discern what is natural or unnatural. Is turning a page any more natural than clicking a link? There’s certainly something to be said for natural transitions, but in terms of effort, I’d say it’s a wash.

If we move past clicking and scrolling and design for understanding, obtaining, and connecting, I think (a) the most creative and appropriate interactions will reveal themselves and (b) we’ll find our designs get to the point much quicker. By looking past the current required action and designing for the end result, we will identify more opportunities for anticipation.

Comments on “Automate this!”

1. Robert Wünsch said:

   Great article! Your last sentence is the most important.

   Let me apply it to your garage opener idea:
   Why would you want to drive your car into a garage? A system could do this for you. Or why do you need a garage for your car anyway?

   A garage is a solution for one or more problems, but it creates its own problems. You have to lock/open the garage (you need a key/identification system for that), you have to make sure it is solid so that your car stays dry and protected, you have to provide more space for a garage than for your car alone so that your car may fit into it, you even have to buy/build a garage and so on.

   So when we think about automatic door openers for a garage, what we are facing are solutions for problems that are created by a solution (“garage”) for another problem (“car should be safe”). Same for light in dark rooms or the paper dispenser. You wouldn’t have to clean your hands if they weren’t dirty.

   Some end results can be reached without any actions if you don’t step into the problem in the first place. So I believe that we can find designs that not solve problems, but dissolve them. Simply by bypassing the problem.

   Here are two ideas: One phone, one number – We want to talk to someone. Who cares where he is? and Why we need no shops at all

2. Matt Donovan said:

   We’re definitely thinking in parallel, just on a different scale. Admittedly, I’m thinking small, when things begin serving multiple purposes we inevitably run into compromises. A garage is a sensible place to park my ’00 forest green Hyundai Elantra because it provides shelter from the rain (necessary because my rear window won’t roll up all the way), a place to both work on it (install spinners, spoiler, performance exhaust, etc.) and keep my tools. Maybe the future may hold progress around the home that automates or even replaces these and other garage activities.