In g-speak, UIs Getting a Minority Report

The amazing human-computer interaction and user interface illustrated in Minority Report lives! It turns out that the science advisor behind Minority Report’s gestural driven UI has been developing a “spatial operating environment” called g-speak.

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Users Are Not Aliens: Why Usability Testing Often Fails

Somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that we’re more alike than different. Our basic knowledge of self is core to our understanding of others. Humans wouldn’t be so adept socially if we were so inept at understanding others. It’s this very adeptness that’s allowed us to survive and thrive for eons. The puzzler is why does the usability / user experience field often lead us away from the tools for the job we we are actually equipped with?

If you’ve got the time to kill on a video, this preso from Adaptive Path touches on the topic a bit as well (starts around at the 15 minute mark)

Synesthesia, Gestalt And Visual Communication / Learning

As any hardcore gamer will tell you, GPUs rule and it turns out our brain has one monster GPU feeding it data and forming impressions. The importance of visual communication / learning was reinforced when I stumbled on a little something, something called Gestalt psychology (everyone’s seen Gestalt tests of some sort and I remember very briefly touching on this in my one college psyche class, but man was it was either early in the morning or one boring professor).

Of course the bit about the the brain being holistic and self-organizing immediately brings to mind the way popularity is distributed within human social networks.

As it turns out, there’s a pretty substantial body of academic work that looks at visual design, communication and learning through a Gestalt lens. One interesting idea is that the parallel processing employed by the brain lets sense impressions be related between disparate senses (synesthesia). So for instance an activity such as typing may appear to be mostly tactile, but is actually mostly visual. Through visual learning we shape our expectations of keyboard interactions and then if possible / needed we map our visual interactions to other senses like the sound of a key being pressed or the feeling of the keyboard (actually all of these stimuli reinforce each other and are used in parallel).

To me this explains why the iPhone’s lack of tactile response is more than made up for by visual and audible cues (the audio is actually a bit over the top for me and I turned it off after the training wheel stage).

In fact visualization is so important that we may actually map our other sensory input to our visual mental model. When we listen to music or read a book we often envision ourselves inside the story or a visual narrative of our own devising. So in some respects most learning may in fact be visual. This has obvious implications for rich media. It’s the core driver behind video on the web and things like screencasting, slidecasting, and annotated screen capture.

And that brings me to what I like to call jingtations–annotated screen capture citations created by Jing. It’s my belief that taking a snapshot of an article fragment and then annotating it by highlighting passages or adding arrows and callout commentary is often a superior way to quote and communicate with people. A jingtation provides context, narrows focus, adds emphasis and provides stylistic relief. It takes someones original thought, adds emphasis, then wraps it up in a visual bow for easier digestion. Its something we all ought to explore, regardless of the tool used, as we seek more efficient ways to communicate clearly and concisely with each other.

Simplicity – The Holy Grail Of Software Development

Simplicity. A word to live by. An unending quest. The holy grail of software. As software makers our raison d’être is making complex tasks easy. We’re back to that elusive word–simplicity. In a beautiful twist of irony it turns out that even thinking about simplicity involves a great deal of complexity. Enter John Maeda’s Ten Laws. I’ve read Maeda’s laws in the past, but as I’ve matured as a software developer they resonate more and more with each passing day. Here are a few of my favorites:

Uncanny Valley? Nah, Most Software Just Sucks

I was reading about Sam Ruby’s experience as an OS X switcher and he mentions the phrase uncanny valley which is an interesting theory on the emotive response of humans to technology (robotics actually) based on how similar the tech is to humanity.

Now I’m guessing our connections to tech are highly subjective and I might not be as nerdy as Sam and therefore less in tune with my virtual desktop, but I’d posit we’re a hell of a long ways from the uncanny valley. The iPhone is probably the most intuitive and enjoyable device I’ve ever used and its not too far up the food chain from an industrial robot. Regardless, it’s an interesting subject to reflect on as a both a tech contributor and consumer.

What’s your gut reaction to your computer, phone, television and the software applications that run on them?