Challenge of User Interfaces

Little room for creativity

A hardware user interface is a physical device or component that allows a user to interact with a computer. Unless you are a philanthropist or the CEO of a large company no problem spending millions on crazy ideas, better not to become creative with computer user interfaces specially for personal productivity products. You can, to some extent, go digital first or else verify that pedestrians are willing to wear a prothesys that do not even ask for.

Human beings are lazy and want to make the minimum effort to obtain the maximum results, always and without exception. Although one can and wants to develop a new and innovative user interface for them, technology and mind blowing that is not enough argument to go against human laziness. That is why I do not recommend innovating in this experience but rather relying on platforms already known and adopted by humanity.

As an Industrial Designer (degreed in UBA Universidad de Buenos Aires), the physical design world came very naturally when I got started with computers How I Got Started on Technology. I thought and conceived the world of computers as a field to innovate through interaction, so much so that my first project that I later patented was Roaming Keyboards, an agnostic touch screen interactive home system. Therefore the user interface space became one of my first fields of research as a technological entrepreneur, which IMO “authorizes” myself to state how hard and tough the UI is. In my case and experience messing up things, big time with UI. An impressive experience that left me with enormous learning in many ways, especially knowing where to innovate and where not to innovate.

Hypothesis

Believing that just because one can master technology and create science fiction does not mean that someone necessarily needs it just because it blows our minds and this applies to all technology in general.

Allways trying to shortcut effort and work, getting the most with the least while being productive or even improve our performance. This simple fact makes any change in that commitment towards lazyness a real threat. We take what comes easy and makes us comfortable with simplicity and uncomfortable (sometimes mad) with the sophisticated, complicated and cumbersome.

Fingers on a keyboard are the cost effective way to input information from our brain into a computer. Human beings can spend more than 8 hours working in a daily basis. Not dancing, not moving the arms or even speaking. Imagine a person moving their body or talking for a long time, only a few can, athletes.

Millions of people make a living out of this energy saving. Its is a fact that pronate position of our hands without moving our arms and open elbows is the cost effective way to use our branins intensively interacting with the computer while not spending energy elsewhere in our body but our heart and main organs.

Background

Some of them that I personally knew and used back in 2014 while working with 2D gestures oriented to gesture interaction and motion detection like Leap Motion, Myo Armband and Microsoft Kinect

Recently VR has gained traction into the interface. Just to mention some examples like Google Glass, Meta Oculus / Quest and most recently Apple Vision

My Own Experience

There is no greater learning in life than experience and boy did I learn. My first real approach to the user with an interface proposal came from PadKite, a mobile multitouch mouse, during that project and given the hype in hacker news thread I did not accept that the sofware was not being adopeted letting myself get carried away by the moment.

Furthermore, I continued the search for innovation in interfaces with gestures in the GestureKit Project, even creating an SDK for developers to create gestures wanting to impose a standard in the industry. Although the project was very interesting from a disruptive point of view, it did not have traction and the users demonstrated that not only do they not want to learn new gestures and are not even interested.

Near Future

Implantable brain-computer interfaces are certainly intriguing and a direct path toward solving the interface for good by connecting the neocortex to the computer by reading brain impulses. This is the case of Neuralink, which proposes the insertion of nanometric filaments attached to a transmitter chip that connects to a computer.

From my point of view, very advanced for its time, it proposes a very invasive means that requires surgical intervention performed by a robot. Perhaps in a few years a less intrusive yet portable medium could be used.

Not having impacted the market and your past maturation time, it is very possible that we will have to wait for new emerging and disruptive technologies that work on our thought impulses, that is the way. I have my doubts about what the application will be like, external, internal, surely something new, even newer than this science fiction movie.

Best Practice

What is a better experience drawing on paper or on an iPad?

Clearly the user experience using paper is not achieved with a tablet, paper is going to be difficult to beat. However, it is the possibilities of the result that the tablet amplifies that make it a cost-benefit for the user outright impacts people’s economies.

Conclusion

Given that not everything in life is economic and enjoyment involves rest, it is mandatory that the interface of preference adopted by humans must produce a stimulus of pleasure and rest as opposed to work. That is to say that you enjoy using it without any effort and that it does not represent a waste of energy. If we put it in practical terms, the cell phone has achieved that stage. It will take several years to find its replacement and it will certainly have to be an object that is not invasive in its implementation. Without a doubt, controlling it with the mind will be a requirement, how that control is achieved is the challenge.