The Frontiers of Natural User Interface Design Part 1
This is the first part of my two-part blog post on the frontiers of natural user interface design.
Natural User Interfaces represent the third and latest paradigm in user interface design. The first user interface design was the use of Command Line Interfaces exemplified by operating systems such as MS-DOS. These eventually gave way to Graphical User Interfaces introduced by the first Macintosh and, later, by Windows. The user interface design of GUIs use visual metaphors to convey meaning such as a trash can icon to signify the recycle bin folder. Natural User Interfaces expand on GUIs by seeking to become invisible with successive learned interactions that are intended to feel as natural as possible. Natural User Interface design takes place on a number of frontiers.
Using Touch/ Gestures to Control a User Interface Design
Using gestures on a touchscreen is perhaps the most advanced form of natural user interfaces. Smartphones and tablets have made brisk business with their intuitive user interface designs that are so natural there are countless videos on YouTube of toddlers learning to use them before they even learn to speak properly! This would be impossible with Command Line Interfaces. The iPhone is undoubtedly the poster boy for using touch to control a user interface design. Swiping and pinch-to-zoom have become so commonplace that Apple has even patented some of these interactions to secure a monopoly. Multi-touch gestures are also now jumping to the desktop as the latest Mac OS X implements iOS gestures
Using Audio to Control a User Interface Design
The idea of audio as a frontier of Natural User Interface design is not new. For accessibility reasons voice control has been implemented in several user interfaces. The Dragon speech recognition software package is built on this very premise. However audio also brings a number of challenges with it. Audio is still better processed by the human brain than by computers, though at the rate technology is growing we might not be too far off from the day when one could simply talk to a computer like one would to another person.
September 1, 2011 No Comments
