The UI - Neon Flickery Signs (Part 2)

Talking of Neon Flickery Signs

There's a lot of heat and noise right now about how different an experience an iPad is from a book. How social media and networking on-line is nothing like a dinner party and how social and political change is being completely affected by 140 character messages. (Doh!) 

There's a lot of excitement over the experience on the web and the new found connectivity we all have. But probably 80-90% of the entire 300,000 Applications in the marketplace (and we can happily download them right now) are designed by people who don't understand the first thing about them. Mostly they get downloaded and immediately consigned to the trash.

What does that say about your brand? Your Neon Is Flickering!

Well yes but it's worth remembering that we are right at the beginning of understanding how these interfaces work. The user interface (UI) is rapidly becoming the our experience of everything. And because this is the case we had better get far better at understanding how to design the things. For us to create powerful new ways to access something in a valuable and exciting way then we need proper design intelligence to get it done properly.

So what insights would drive the perfect UI?

1. Meaning & Purpose. It would have to leave me feeling lonely when I wasn't attached to it. 
2. Anticipatory. It would have to have third guessed each move I was about to make. 
3. Learning. It would have to know me intimately and more and more each time I used it …
4. …and it would have to be so useful and relevant to what I want to spend my life doing that I would want to find a way to smuggle it into every part of my waking life. 
5. Indispensable. When I died it came with me to Varsic 8.
6. Designed To Work. It would be so well designed that the shape and form of it was referred to as the gold standard for a UI. People would have its design printed as t-shirts and songs and poems would be written about its symmetry. 
7. Loved. It would be a brand. 
8. Loved Yet More. Brands would float naturally within it and be at peace in its existence.
9. Connectedness. As required it would know when and how to connect with everything it needed to connect to. 
10. Intuitive. Above all though it would be simple elegant and intuitive to use - needing zero instruction. 
11. Utility. It would be so amazingly useful my behaviour and life would change.

There are a few examples of this level of UI emerging now. I have a few that are beginning to fall into this category. iTunes, my Tumblr blog, my kitchen, my Starbucks app, Yammer, Podio and Pinterest. But they are all personally relevant and for different reasons. And still there are a massive number that fail to understand the idea of the UI at all. So 'No Progress. Just a Flickery Neon sign.

Well to be fair of course there is huge progress even though we can all see millions of fails along the road and yes they do spoil the view. Far too many companies have let so called designers loose to create dreadful expressions of half baked ideas in the name of not being left out of the race for a

 UI.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!