Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The best technology is invisible
I was invited to attend the Frontiers of Interaction conference in Florence today. It is a fantastic event, sort of the TED of Italy, with speakers coming from all over the world. If you close your eyes, you would think you are in Silicon Valley, then you eat at the coffee break and you realize you are in Italy ;-) The best of both worlds.
Anyway, the talk I enjoyed the most was one by Amber Case, titled Cyborg Anthropology and the Evaporation of the Interface. I was pretty much in agreement with everything Amber said, which is a rare case for me...
One slide hit me so much that I felt I had to take a picture.
The best technology is invisible.
I could not have said that better.
The beauty of this statement is that it comes from a UX designer. The goal of people in this field is to build the best user interfaces. What is the best UI? The one that does not exist. It is there, it does things for you, but you do not see it. It is like magic. The UX designer destroys the UI. It makes it disappear.
It has always been my mantra (yep, I have a usability background too, apparently we like to destroy our jobs as well ;-) and I tried to apply it to Funambol every step of the way. Synchronization should just work. You take a video and it magically appears on all your devices, without you touching a button. No need to click on sync. Ever. We pushed it so far that at a certain point we realized we screwed our chances to add an advertising layer (well, you need real estate for it, if the UI does not exist, it is hard to put a banner anywhere...).
Still, I believe it is the best way to build a user interface. Make it magical. User will like it because they will not see it. The robots out there are working for us, life gets easier, I do not have to upload anything, I save five minutes of my life every day to do what I really like instead.
The best technology is invisible. It just works. The machines are working for us, not the opposite. It is how the future should be.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 13:12
4 Comments:
Franco Fiorese said...
I fully agree - every time I think about a new application/service/function, after long and complex investigations I always come to the same conclusion: how would be great if a system would do all the work for us behind the scenes - and maybe the only real user' interface' would some sort of interaction at the beginning needed only to configure (or better "teach" the application) it on how to make the service ready to work.
Comment Posted at 02:06
Albegor said...
Invisible technology is an oxymoron in my opinion.
I prefer the word transparent... since we, as developers/UX designers, aim for invisibility, but we can't really reach it!
I mean, technology, be it hardware or software, will be always visible somehow, and our effort is to make it fade to the point that for users the product "just works".
Interesting issue, btw, I'm sorry couldn't attend Amber Case talk.
Comment Posted at 05:10
paola said...
Not just technology should be invisible, but the entire product should completly disappear.
It is not an estetic issue, it is an emotional one most of all.
Your experience using the product should naturally match your real life.
The same product should match each different user attitude and real lives.
This I belive will be the web 3.0.
The web as a powerfull tool to improve people lives.
It is not estetic that really matter, it is the emotional experience that it can achieve.
Comment Posted at 17:46
krishna mohan said...
what is the invisible technology
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