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No UI is the New UI : Towards Future Transparent Interactions
No UI is the New UI : Towards Future Transparent Interactions

May 23, 2021

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For many decades, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have dominated the way we interact with computers, and continue to be the primary way of interacting with our computing devices even though they are continuously evolving into radically different forms and becoming wildly more ubiquitous. Advances such as multi-touch, gestural input and capacitative screens have moved interaction far beyond.

Some applications like Magic & Operator have become special and popular because they do not use traditional UI. The entire App revolves around a single messaging screen. These are called invisible and conversational apps. Facebook has even recently released M, a personal assistant that’s integrated with Messenger to help you do just about anything.

The rise in popularity of these apps recently brought a startling observation: Advances in technology, especially in AI, are increasingly making traditional UI irrelevant. It is now believed that technological progress will eventually make UI a tool of the past, something no longer essential for human-computer interaction. And that’s a good thing.

One could argue that conversational and invisible apps aren’t devoid of UI. After all, they still require a screen and a chat interface. While it is true that these apps do require UI design to some extent, I believe these are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them, new technologies have the potential to disrupt the screen entirely.

Non-visual User Interaction (no-UI) is pioneered by the ground-breaking work of researchers who have realized that, in today’s world, we are surrounded by computers and applications that constantly require our attention: smartphones, tablets, laptops and smart-TVs competing for brief moments of our time to notify us about an event or to request our action. Staying abreast of developments will turbo-charge your skill set, so you can access users in more ingenious ways.

Designer and author of the best-selling book “The Best Interface is No Interface” believes that we’re quickly becoming a society that’s obsessed with our screens and that the companies making and marketing apps aren’t doing us any favors. “Our love for the digital interface is out of control,”. He says It’s a notion that he’s been digging into and developing in the months since. “Many people don’t want more time with screens, they want less,”

The book lays out how we got to this app-obsessed point and how we can turn things around and ensure that we’re using the best tool for the job.

The no-UI experience: curated knowledge 

Three No-UI Interaction Building Blocks

  • Observations: the local friend has factored in a number of facts about yourself: whether you are dining alone or with a partner, your age and fitness level, the time of day and the distance of the hotel to other restaurants. These are facts that our mobile devices can “sense”. As a designer, you can leverage information provided via hardware sensors, data repositories internal or external to a device, or user profiling: for example, companionship via Bluetooth, location via GPS/networks and venue locations via databases, age and fitness via apps (e.g., Google Fit), time of the day via the clock. Don’t ask the user for information unless you can’t get it otherwise!
  • External knowledge: your friend also knows a lot of things: many tourists have given her feedback about some of the places she recommended, how much you might like a place depending on whether you are dining with a partner or group, how busy a place is likely to be, the quality of their food against their prices, her knowledge of the area and how complicated a route to a venue is, etc. As a designer, keep abreast of technological developments and be aware of techniques for extracting knowledge from external sources—e.g., semantically and emotionally analyzing comments and tips left at venues, knowing the daily spread of check-ins at venues, knowing the profiles of users who have visited a venue, etc. Various APIs from services such as FourSquare or Google+ are able to give us such knowledge, and there are ways of organizing it in a meaningful manner (e.g., ontologies).
  • Intelligence: Based on her observations and external knowledge, your friend has made a number of assumptions about you. Matching the observation to knowledge requires intelligence (and some creative thinking). This is the hardest part indeed – while the capture and organization of observation and knowledge is relatively easy, it needs prioritizing: for example, it’s no good recommending lunch at the most popular restaurant—which also happens to be very close to your location—if it’s closed at lunchtime. At other times, seemingly unimportant information might become crucial – it’s your partner’s birthday and her favourite food is Chinese; so, on that particular day—and only then—this becomes the number one criterion. Notice here that the criterion is not even about the user as an individual: We live in a world of complex relations with other humans and social rules, and capturing that context is not always easy, even for us as a species.

The critical element binding everything together here is intelligence. Without this step, a no-UI application is impossible. Intelligence determines not only what result you as a designer should present to the user, but also how you should present it.

 

Sources/References: Interaction Design, Golden Krishna, Tony Aube

 


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Nishant Kumar
Technology Enthusiast

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