Why haven't interaction design principles progressed more over the last 2000 years? Is it that intuitive interfaces are deceptively difficult to create? Is there a shortage of knowledge transfer? Does the fact that anyone can *design* an interface help or hurt the transfer of sound design principles?
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2 Comments
Andres Galarza says:
John Maeda wrote,
What is there to progress towards, really? The desire for something to be easy to use, yet very powerful, transcends beyond even the 2000 year old artifact (which is a wonder of design) in the video. The guiding principles behind good interaction design have changed little from the time that dudes were wearing loincloths 200,000 years ago. No one likes jumping through unnecessary hoops.
How simple and intuitive is Google? Think about how complex the logic that runs Google’s search is.
With increased access to the web, a shortage of knowledge transfer has become less of a crutch. Lack of access is a problem, even where it was invented, but once connected there’s no shortage of good and bad examples of good interaction design.
The optimist in me thinks that the fact that "anyone" can design a user interface can only help. The unprecedented access to information, particularly if you work in this industry, means that if you don’t adopt sound principles of design, then it’s by choice or ignorance and not from the lack of access to knowledge.
Is this too simplistic of a view to have?
Jeremy (ZURB) says:
Calling this a computer is a bit over the top. How is it that a 2000 year old hand-cranked clock is an example of little progress in interaction design today?
I think sometimes we forget how old our amazing technologies really are. Stanford just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first personal computer. (Our desktops are already middle aged!) Heck, some of our favorite software like Photoshop is almost 30 years old. Technological innovation takes more time than we like to think.
But as my examples show, it is speeding up. Maybe that's your answer: we haven't progressed as much as you'd think because for most of the past 2000 years we've been slow to fail. And after all, isn't this clock another example of a failed product design? If it was a success we wouldn't have to be rediscovering it two millennia later. What other, more successful mechanical devices did it influence? Or was the knowledge that went into it lost? That'd be a true failure.
At least in the 21st century we do this stuff faster.
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