Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
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Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
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Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#2I think the issue has more to do with siloed communication than with how people want to interact with each other. Take the Google Hangouts app for example. It uses a similar approach to what the post advocates: click on a person, then select text or gchat as a medium. But I don't really care if I'm using text or gchat, I care that the recipient gets the message that I send without a duplicate message arriving in another medium. Which is how Apple messages works within their closed garden, but it's not going to find my friends on email or Facebook message or gchat or whatever other medium.
So we go to a dedicated texting app or dedicated email app because we assume the recipient is going to get the message from that medium in a convenient and timely fashion. Whatsapp, Snapchat, FB Messenger, Hangouts, etc etc all contribute to the app-centric model by creating new silos. See http://xkcd.com/927/.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#3This is an interesting article. And you will not find many like that one around. For starters, why I think Apple approach is also People Centric. Because software that solves a specific problem, deserves an icon. One solution - one set of documents. You can drag images here and there with Apple API form one app to another if you like to do something specific with them and they are kept under that specific icon. Camera+ is a good example. iAWriter is a good example for texts. You have your documents _for writing_ in the app that does exactly the thing - writing. And I like that.
And no one asks why I cannot Open With another program. No orphaned documents in Apple model.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#4The market leaders cannot/will not implement large breaking features taken from market losers. It's the same reason why most of WebOS's innovations haven't been adopted, and those that have have done so in a much more muted way.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#5Is our world particularly people-centric? It may be just what we are used to. If I want to mail something to someone, I go to a post office or a post box and mail it. If I want to have dinner with the family, I go to the dining room or the kitchen with food. If I want to talk face to face with someone, I physically walk to the location that "contains" them (office/room/house) and talk to them.
People are not instantly available objects that we interact with in the real world, so I imagine the "block" is somewhere in there.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#6Communication tools that people use heavily enough to care about acquire a context beyond just "Who I can communicate with". As the recipient, for the majority of my routine communications I get information from medium > sender > content, even though all ways of reaching me just make my phone jingle.
The series of decisions that results in me calling someone is so radically different than the one that results in IMing them that I'd never find it useful to start with a person and then decide to IM or call.
I'm about as often in the task-oriented position of thinking "I should call someone" or "I wonder who's awake on jabber" as the person-oriented position anyway.
tl;dr: The medium is the message
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#7Say I want to browse the web. Or check my inbox. Or read Hacker News. Or get a file off of my Dropbox. Or read an ebook.
None of those things are "people-centric", e.g. they aren't tied to a single (other) person. People-centric UI doesn't make sense because I use my computer for interacting with many users at once simultaneously through websites, mail, etc. If I'm not doing that, I may be interacting with my personal data. And probably least commonly, I am interacting with a single person. So "person-centric" (not people-centric", despite what the title claims) design isn't taking off because I'm not interacting with one single person for the majority of my time when I use technology.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#8One thing is that different communication programs are different "spaces" - you tend to associate one with one kind of thing for certain people, another with another. People-centric is really just one instance of document-centric, the "people" just being the data associated with the person. I suppose these icons on windows phone with different apps that can be opened from them are basically Windows's "open with". Android's dialog you get when opening a data url is the same letting you choose what app to open it with, such as if multiple apps are associated with phone numbers and you open a phone # from your contacts app.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#9I met two "new" sysadmins the hard way today (fixing a problem).
People centered would work with people you already know. But the mode switching impedance jump would be icky when you inevitably need to go into search mode. So I'm totally used to clicking on my people centered UI boss contact icon, but now I need some other mode to look these guys up in company email.
Even worse I'm not sure how to represent social distance and rapid changes in social distance in a people centered UI. Yes I've never talked to these friends of friends of friends before today, but this morning, oh boy were they ever the most important people in my social network.
Finally talk about degrading non-gracefully. "John Smith is broken" What does that mean? Then you've got to do the whole "ignore the man behind the curtain" to break thru the abstraction to figure out twitter is down again. Its going to feel very fake when it works and helpless when it breaks. Ah I know just make sure no service ever fails (LOL).
PS am I the only person who looked at the "modern" UI and winced? That is an utter abomination. Hurts my eyes hard to read. Side by side I would never select the "new" UI over the "old" UI. More cluttered than a hoarders basement. More garish and clashing colors than a 1995 webpage or a 1985 color desktop publishing memo. At least the ancient UI could be decoded and read as a text menu with visually annoying cruft, the new one is unusable.
Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?
#10I don't have any friends or know any people. This wouldn't help me much.