Yup. Nope. That's just how film people portrayed these interfaces. Film people and film editors and motion graphics artists are artists - not designers. Design is about functionality. It's about form. It's much less creative than a lot of people realize. Bad designers are typically great artists. But art is about decoration (and emotion and stories and all that jazz) while design is about function. That's the biggest obstacle I had to overcome when I began designing. Wait? My awesome color picker site that ensures I have the bestest color pallet doesn't make my design great?! We fucking love color in film. Color theory is everything. We masturbate to the symbolism provided by color in great films. Hmm...this sounds like art to me. Art is about the story and seeing the artist's presence is part of that story. Like film editing, I don't think the notion of the designer should be in the design. They say that the greatest edits are the one's you never notice, the greatest editors are literally never seen. I apply this to designers as well. Nope. Every interaction and icon and everything doesn't have to be realistic. Icons originated in that way because people had never used a computer before and so they based the icons on things people would recognize. Desktops. Trash Cans. Erasers. Pencils. Most of these icons are now dated (ie: a floppy drive for "save"). Today, we live and breath technology and interfaces. Interactions on devices no longer needs to be "realistic" because realistic no longer only includes real life. It includes all the experiences we've had on these devices for years and years. The push pin on the map has evolved to a simple shape rather than a literal push pin. The primary goal should be to let your users know what they are doing, what they have done, and give them the ability to inherently know how to do whatever they want to do next. We don't even notice it anymore, but we are consistently guided through processes like this every day. It only becomes apparent when the design is bad and we don't know what we are supposed to do next, we don't know what we just did, we don't know how to go back, or we can't figure out how to access what we want to access. See my above point about designers not being seen. Sure, but I still don't know why your heart has anything to do with this.In this dream from the 90's, we hoped for a world where every computer knows us personally. We would wake up to them, have them around us all day, and they would be the last thing we interact with before we go to sleep. They would predict our needs and wants and all interfaces would feel as natural as having a conversation with a friend. Technology would become our primary means (or only means) of communication and we would form relationships with these objects that take care of us.
In other words, we’re expected to translate our emotions through emotionless interfaces.
The work becomes more humanized in its tone and effect, so it becomes easy to see that there are people behind it.
Replicating what we see in everyday life reminds us of our personal experiences so the primary goal should be to make every interaction feel realistic.
The future of interface design isn’t a dream from the 90s. The future of interface design is about emotional awareness; connecting us with products the way we connect with each other.
I can't say that I agree with much more, but hey, I'm the Toynbee Tile guy. IMO design should 1) get the job done, and 2) feel good doing it. More often than not, that means not being noticeably present. Something that feels refreshing the first few times often becomes annoying after repetition. The way that posts float into Google+ from the bottom left on mobile is an example. I was recently pointed to this: http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js and was tempted, but chose not to.
I'll add a Point 3: AND THAT'S ALL. Most of the arguments in this article reflect an immersive UI - if I'm playing a side-scroller I'm probably not trying to do something else at the same time. Thus, audible cues work fine. Give me audible cues in in a calendar app, though, and suddenly you're requiring immersion of me when in fact your app is a tiny portion of my involvement. That's why her statement about taking cues from '90s movies rings so hollow - bleepy bloopy floaty windows are awesome for presentation and shit for interaction. Considering most every UI is designed for interaction and always has been, there's a reason things haven't changed appreciably since PARC.
If I can turn an apps sounds off It's pretty much guaranteed that I will only hear them once. People who have click sounds enabled on their touchscreeen phones key boards leave me in awe, how can they take it, are they mad men or fucking demons? Makes me want to slap the phone out of their hand.
Funny you say that... My audio stopped working on my phone recently. I usually have the sound off so I didn't notice it at first. Then, I missed a few calls in the evening even though sound was on and I couldn't hear anything via youtube, "unlock sound" etc. Turned out, there was some corrosion on the bottom plug that made my phone think it was plugged into an external device and handed over operations to said imaginary device. Then, after a few weeks of no sound, I about shit my pants when the loudest "clickly clack clicky clack" sound exploded as I was texting. I was elated! I was intrigued! I could hear again! And so naturally, I immediately turned my keyboard sounds off, switched my phone to silent, and continued about my normal life. Turns out, not having your phone ring is kind of nice.
I always have my phone silenced. It eliminates the awkward phone going off during a meeting or in the library etc. The other day it somehow was switched back on and it rang. -I had completely forgotten that I had a song for my ringtone.
1) A designer who hates "arbitrary social functions" designs an arbitrary social function and then bitches when it gets rejected because she doesn't understand arbitrary social functions. 2) A designer whose "heart = like" idea gets rejected then says "My previous colleague’s refusal to add an emotionally-associated action to the app is a symptom of a pervasive obsession in the tech industry. The visual trend in interface design occasionally mimics interfaces out of past science fiction T.V. shows and movies." Note that pervasive becomes occasional one sentence later, yet the rest of the article sticks with pervasive. 3) "In this dream from the 90's, we hoped for a world where every computer knows us personally. We would wake up to them, have them around us all day, and they would be the last thing we interact with before we go to sleep." Apparently someone hasn't seen Star Trek (1966). 4) AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: "The pursuit of delight is in the details." Said the girl who messed up one detail, and then argued it was because too many people were longing for Siri and Minority Report in 1994. 5) So let's look to video games, the most immersive form of casual entertainment humanity has ever created, in order to understand casual UI. In particular, sound. Which is so important ("Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviourally") that we ought to be able to turn it off at will ("provided they have the option to opt-out."). 6) Pixar. 7) Vine's interface is human because it looks like a drawer (despite the fact that it was engineered to behave like a roll-up blind, a UI trick dating back to OS 6 on Mac). 8) Use words. 9) "The future of interface design isn’t a dream from the 90s. The future of interface design is about emotional awareness; connecting us with products the way we connect with each other." Therefore, you were wrong to reject my heart. I'm cool with (8). (1)-(7) and (9) are pretty lazy and dishonest arguments to make and, in the case of the Pixar jab, pretty out there. Okay, not 90%. 88.9.%
Does it? That's the trend? Maybe I'm out of the loop here, but the impression I've been getting downloading software for the past year is that UI design is trending in the exact opposite direction. Flat design, a retreat from skeuomorphism and the emergence of UI elements that are "digitally native" and don't reference real world analogs (that are arguably functional, let alone ones that mimic bad sic-fi interfaces from 90's television). That supporting screen cap from the Matrix...just...no. That isn't the trend. Even in 1999 that scene reminded me of the early 80's sitting in front of my primitive Apple IIc "green screen." Again, my sample size could just be too small and I'm living in a bubble, but dammit if half the buttons on my smartphone UI haven't completely dropped shadows and borders because I'm now supposed to just know that the elements are buttons from experience while they "get out of the way" of the content.The visual trend in interface design occasionally mimics interfaces out of past science fiction T.V. shows and movies.