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kleinbl00  ·  3719 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Helen Tran: The Future of UI and the Dream of the ‘90s

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.%