User Interfaces of the FUTURE

I am a sucker for speculative prototyping of device designs for the future. Bring on the Jetsons car, the jetpack, the transformer, the replicator, the heads-up wearable display camera, all of it!

Here are two articles packed with such gizmos to delight and inspire:
Innovative Designs and Devices
User Experience of the Future

My favorite is definite the aquatic car, especially after our recent deluge of rain.

"The Future is here, it is just unevenily distributed." - William Gibson

Adobe Experience Design

Spent some time wandering around the Adobe Experience Design site, and, meh, it has some usability Fails such as bad sign-posting, lack of wayfaring markers, confusing IA, and no indication of freshness. Feels kind of lonely and abandoned in general. Kind of disappointing considering how much I love and rely on the Adobe app suite.

However, I did appreciate their UE mantras, which I dug up from under the misnomer of patterns in the sparsely populated resource library. I am going to repeat them here, for easy client reference later:

1. Show Progress and Sequence
2. Provide Help Inline
3. Leave Breadcrumbs
4. Establish Visual Distinction
5. Make Visual Connections
6. Offer Entry Points
7. Choreograph Changes in Layout
8. Show Details in Place
9. Show Master-Detail Relationships
10. Provide Controls In-line
11. Reveal Control Progressively
12. Leverage Parallel Categories
13. Organize with Card Lists
14. Enable Direct Manipulation
15. Provide Transport Controls for Dynamic Media
16. Let Users Go Home
17. Include a Dynamic Back Button
18. Save Without Asking
19. Enable Undo

Ilustrator UI Elements Symbol Library

I just made a Symbol library of the UI elements I am constantly using in wireframe diagrams. I have been meaning to do that for FOREVER.

Orangy Rainbow Goodness

I am super-entertained by this Flash site, and I don't even know what it is for:
http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go

And this site, which is a teaser for Wall*E:
http://www.buynlarge.com

How to Defang Scary Technolongy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/jobs/16career.html

Key take-away here: fear and lack of confidence are key inhibitors to learning tech. User experiences that create the semblance of simplicity and friendliness win, like, well, the ubiquitous iPod.

User Experience Discipline Gains Ground

Great article on the promise and pitfalls of Experience Design: http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/on-the-ground-running-lessons-from-experience-design/

I am convinced that interface/user/web design are going to diminish as practices in favor of experience design in the future. Instead of site maps as a static diagrams, I hope to be creating temporal evolution flow diagrams. Instead of single point prototypes, I foresee mutating life cycle prototypes, and so on ...

Silicon Sycophants

I stumbled upon a study today from 1997 that really resonated titled Silicon Sycophants. In short, it claims that people respond better to flattery, even when they know it is automatically generated by a computer. This dovetails nicely into a long standing precept of mine that goes Language Matters, with the by-law of Have a Voice.

I have recently been playing a game online called Kingdom of Loathing. It has no animation, no colored shiny things, no exciting cutting edge technology. It is made up of simple html and stick figure drawings. What it does have is incredibly witty and clever writing, and that alone was enough to get me hooked.