Simplify User Experience: Make It Physical

These days I spent most of my time thinking about user experience. I see increasing importance of getting the user experience right. As I discussed on my earlier post, I believe that good user experience is human-computer interaction designed to be so intuitive that almost invisible to the users.

I Had To Struggle With This Perfectly Functional
In-Flight Entertainment UI Built Pre-iPhone

If you are international traveler, you are now accustomed to seeing personal in-flight entertainment system. I just had a pleasure of sitting in front of one for 14 and half hours. When you are stuck on a plane for that long, perhaps it is expected that you'll learn how to navigate through different screens with controller.

Before touchscreen user interface, interacting with controller looked perfectly normal thing to do. If you want to move the cursor around, you use four arrow keys. If you want to select something, you first highlight it then press enter. That's how we've been interacting with computer, Nintendo, XBox, and Playstation. Things were perfect. Until iPhone came out, that was.



Now we expect to touch the display with our finger directly. Why bother with placing cursor over something just to select it? Pointing with finger is so much more natural as we come to find out with iPhone, iPad, and many other touch screen devices.

I had to catch myself several times trying to fingerpoint the selection that I wanted on in-flight entertainment display. And I've had my iPhone for less than 6 months. Once you learn something and it's working for you, there is no going back. It's impossible to unlearn something that you've already learned.

If you think about it, the reason why touch screen user experience is so compelling is simple. It's because it extends what we are already used to in physical world. Pointing, touching, dragging, and shaking are all the things that we've learned since we were toddlers. Physical things have weights, volumes and are subject to Newton's laws of motion that we've grown up with, even before we learned it on our high school Physics class.

Because these are almost second nature to all of us, interacting with computer icons and widgets the same way that we would interact with physical things is more natural than having to go through mouse or controller.

I see accelerating trend of making user interaction more physical, getting rid of controller all together. Once you've learned to use good physical extension, it will feel moronic to go back and use controllers again.

In some ways, we are already there. Check out Microsoft Kinect: