41–50 of 78 posts
I like that my profiles are available to people I want to communicate with. I don't like that they are also potentially available to siding salesmen (I live in an apartment).
The downside of the app-centric thing is an odd sort of discretization of the user-experience via apps. PC's now feel much more free-form in that user interaction is still largely driven by files (i.e. "documents").
Absolutely not! Not to scream and shout, but absolutely NOT!
I have contacts who are both friends and coworkers or business partners or customers. I do NOT want to get in touch with them with "any app at all", I want the app that supports the workflow or information sharing pertinent to the context at hand. For a friend context, that might mean facebook. For a partner context, that might mean email - or our CRM - or something else entirely - but NEVER facebook.
The context comes first, then the people.
People-centric UI might work, but only once machines are far more sensitive to context.
On my phone I have about 20 apps that I use frequently, 200 people that I need to contact, and about 2000 documents in the form of media files and notes. It seems obvious to me that application-centric design is the simplest way to organize my computing device. I think pinning people or documents to the main menu would make things way too cluttered and confusing.
I think the article author has a great point, but it isn't a paradigm to overturn all others. Just a position that people-centric should be a first-class use case, up there with people-centric and app-centric.
Let's put it another way - do you frequently open Acrobat or Excel then use File -> Open to navigate to a file? I am absolutely positive that most people click on the file most of the time. In the same way as OSes have favoured apps - phone main screens, the OSX dock, desktop icons, pin to taskbar - there is usually a selection of often-used, easily accessible documents - desktop icons, document stacks, recent files, favourites etc. Why not have your favourite people in the most-accessible areas?
Of course, one answer is that we are still most of all still file-centric, and there isn't a common container for person-with-all-their-contact-details. (And not just their contact details: the person container could have all kinds of indicators of their status and recent activity, at whatever level they have shared with you). But phones are busily trying to squash the file metaphor as it is, and the 'main screen tile' is a general kind of container that can be, already has been, extended to have person-centred features.
I think we will see more of this, and we won't all like all of it, but as a whole it will be a step forward.
On my phone I have about 20 apps that I use frequently, 200 people that I need to contact, and about 2000 documents in the form of media files and notes. It seems obvious to me that application-centric design is the simplest way to organize my computing device. I think pinning people or documents to the main menu would make things way too cluttered and confusing.
click a picture of your friend and then contact them in any possible way using any enlisted app from there Absolutely not! Not to scream and shout, but absolutely NOT! I have contacts who are both friends and coworkers or business partners or customers. I do NOT want to get in touch with them with "any app at all", I want the app that supports the workflow or information sharing pertinent to the context at hand. For…
I'm not saying that I like that method, but I don't think that it would be an automatic thing.
The thing about computers is that yeah, they're awesome at communication, but they do a lot of other stuff too that has nothing to do with person to person transmission of information. IMHO task -oriented UI makes the most sense because I use my computer as a general-purpose tool to get stuff done. In all use cases I find myself performing a type of task. Only in a subset of cases do I find myself communicating with…
The real problem, which the author does not discuss even though it's implicit in some of his examples, is that many of the apps on a typical phone (or desktop computer, for that matter) aren't the right verbs; they're verbs that were easy for the programmer to program, not verbs that are easy for the user to use. You fix that by making better apps, not by switching from app-centric to people-centric design.
I've often imagined how great it would be if operating systems were a little more opinionated about how data is represented, and how data and tools interact. Wouldn't it be great if every photo on your computer had the same rich capabilities? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to text your friend right from the browser when you see them mentioned in a news article?
But over the years I've seen how UI innovation happens, and the way this plays out is always "constrictive OS UI principles from several years ago" vs "new hot app that does one thing awesomely in a way that's incompatible with the UI toolkit".
And in the end, it's more valuable to people to have a really nice whatever-it-is than to have consistency and interoperability across all of their apps.
For that reason I think data will probably always be represented by a proper name first (Instagram, etc) and then the actual thing second.