A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

No the ZuneHD doesn't have buttons for those interactions, and the ability to read out whatever I touch is more of an aid than an true interaction element.

My ideal is that we shouldn't always be aiming for items on the screen to interact with. We've traded hardware buttons for software buttons, even though the ability to recognize things like swipe now exist and are much more natural. With a button, I have to hit that exact spot. With more natural movements, like swiping, I am creating an action over a more general area. I don't have to be so exact, and therefore, I often don't need to look at the screen at all.

On the ZuneHD, it works like this, swipe right to left on the screen is skipe forward a track, swipe left to right is back. Swipe up is volume up, swipe down is volume down. Hold the right side is fast forward, hold the left side is rewind. tap the center is play/pause, tap bottom left corner is shuffle/unshuffle (though this is a visual button, it is fairly easy to hit without looking at the screen).

Unlocking a ZuneHD is the same as a WP7 (though many people haven't seen those either). You just swipe up on the lock screen and it unlocks.

With all of these interactions (excluding shuffle), you aren't aiming for a button, just a general area on the screen.

In comparison with the iPod Touch/iPhone, to unlock, you are targeting a fairly specific area at the bottom of the screen. Easy to miss the swipe area if you aren't looking. On WP7 the whole screen is the swipe area. As long as you start at the bottom, and swipe up.

Same with skipping tracks, on iPod Touch, it is a forward button on screen. You have to hit the specific spot. With the ZuneHD, you just swipe across the middle-ish area of the screen, and it will go forward the track. You aren't aiming at a specific item to interact with. It is all a very natural feeling.

This was one of my big disappointments with the iPod Touch. After the original iPod was such an amazing design for navigating and playing music, Apple told us about this great new touch interface and how we could swipe our fingers across the screen to interact, and how it was all so natural. But the swipe interaction was only on coverflow, which is somewhat useless. They missed the opportunity to make swipe a key navigation element in iOS.

I feel the same way about iOS apps today. Why do I have a back button at the top of the app. The back button slides a panel from left to right and shows me the previous content. Why am I aiming for a target at the top left (rarely comfortable if you are holding the phone in your right hand), rather than swiping across the screen and sliding the panel?

One thing that is overlooked with voice control is privacy. There's a reason why the SIRI demo videos show people using their iPhone in their own home; nobody wants to broadcast their intentions and interactions to bystanders. Even for 'innocent' commands, there is a while to go yet before talking in that strange scifi dialect (required for comprehension by computers) won't get you strange looks. Maybe with technology that picks up subvocalisations?

would be interesting if it could also

* morph into different shapes depending on what it is being used for and representing.

* change its tactile qualities for different uses

* display any details anywhere on its surface (i.e. its entire surface is a screen).

...hmm, wonder if such a thing could also use a powerful gyroscope (or something else) to vary the resistance of how it can be moved through space.

The author makes a very valid point, and it would be quite interesting to see what kinds of tactile UI designs might be achieved. But I think there's an important distinction to be made in how we build tools to solve physical problems and how we build tools to solve conceptual ones.

Apart from purely remediative technologies such as Braille, I can't think of any technology from any era of human history in which conceptual information has ever been conveyed via the tactile sense. There have never been tactile clocks, tactile books, or any kind of tactile language. When human minds attempt to import ideas from the outside word, they use the eyes and ears, not the hands.

There's certainly a real problem with the UIs presented in the MS video, but it's not that they're visually-oriented. It's that they're designed to appeal to the eyes themselves, and fail to encode information in a way that's optimally suited to the mind. The aesthetics of the UIs in that video are stunningly beautiful, but I have no idea from looking at them how I would use them as tools; each notification, dialog box, and prompt for input seems fine in isolation, but when I try to conceptually 'zoom out' and understand how each function integrates into a workflow that allows me to apply my capabilities toward fulfilling my needs, I'm completely at a loss.

There seems to be an unfortunate trend toward pure visual aesthetics in the software industry today - perhaps a cargo-cult attempt to emulate some of Apple's successes - and MS seems to be suffering from it almost as badly as the Ubuntu and Gnome folks.

Well - those were just quick reactions I had to the video. But, I think if I could now somehow set my own childhood educational curriculum, I don't think long division would be on it.

I don't think I know how to do long division, at the moment. I certainly haven't done it in very many years. I suspect very few people ever do it. Computers even follow different algorithms.

I would definitely agree that learning simple algorithms is important for future development. But why division? It'd be good to show kids an example, to let them see how its possible. But I wouldnt make them practice it, to internalise it.

I'd put something like 'binary search' on the general curriculum, instead of long division. I see a future where many more people are going to have to manipulate information, all the time, and I think teaching things like simple programming concepts to the general population, is probably more valuable than teaching simple arithmetic rules.

I don't know what way data manipulation technology will pan out - but I'd hope that in future, we can come up with better things to have children internalise, than simple arithmetic algorithms.