We have to learn another one?
Posted in Latest, News, Thoughts - February 21, 2010 - tim
Moore’s Law brings many blessings.
No one can say that the scarily consistent improvements in computing power – processor speed, storage density, screen resolution, etc. – don’t result in general improved user experiences over time. But for the folks who make a living (or hobby) of crafting the so-called Human-Computer Interface, keeping up with what is possible, and arguably necessary, is tough.
And it’s about to get tougher.
Dimension 1- From Audible to Visible
I could argue that the first real UI “breakthrough” goes as far back as writing itself - clay tablets or maybe more realistically the Gutenberg press. Getting any form of consistent communication on any form of “media” was the first big 1.5 dimension challenge. But in the context of those of us who deal with user interfaces in the interactive / computer world it really started with the screen (or terminal as we called them back then).
Sure, back when we fired up the screechy old 300 baud modems the text was crawling across two-dimensional space (the x-y space of the screen), but from a UI perspective the text moved from one point (top left) to another (bottom right).
This was all fine and good, and I (and many others) spent many late nights trolling strange BBS’s (long before the Internet) with our nose pressed to the screen watching the “crawl”. We certainly considered at the time that it would be cool (and probably inevitable) that the screen would become “addressable” and thus 2-dimensional, but it was hard to see at the time what that would actually bring us.
Dimension 2 – Addressable X-Y Coordinates
Bam (as Steve Jobs would say). When fully addressable screens happened (long before the Macintosh ya’ll) the first real need for UI design hit with impact. ”Layout” became a serious consideration as it has remained since. Consistency of controls, placement, function, process, motion conservation, etc. all came into much higher profile.
But this stage of evolution also brought a “nested” evolution: that of color / bit depth, the number of shades and/or colors that could be expressed by a single pixel on the screen. In the beginning (like the old insanely cool orange plasma IBM terminals that made that sound when they refreshed) a pixel was either on (1) or off (0). You could control the brightness of the terminal overall, but the pixels only had those two states – keeping us firmly (for the moment) in purely two dimensional representations of interface. 8-bit (256 colors), 16-bit (65k colors) and 24-bit (millions of colors) followed (probably right on Moore’s schedule) accordingly and greatly enhanced UI designers ability to create interesting interfaces, but it wasn’t until we had decent penetration of higher resolution (decent dpi and scale screens) with high bit depth colors (24-bit +, the + being alpha channels) that we really entered ..
Dimension 3 – UI Depth
Setting aside the new 3D TV’s and consoles for a moment (because it is really just visual sleight of hand aided – for the moment – by outrigger hardware) UI designers have had to grok a couple of flavors of 3D with regard to UI design.
There is certainly the 3D domain of the animation (TV, film) and game crowds, but that’s a rather elite corps out there. These are folks that in most cases model stuff in 3D (X-Y-Z space) and then use logical camera moves to generate the parallax effect magic that they do – on a flat (2D) screen. We all see, know and love this stuff, but it’s not mainstream UI design.
Of more import vis-a-vis the 3rd dimension in UI design has actually been the concept of “layering”. Photoshop and Illustrator (2D tools) folks are deeply familiar with the concept of layers, and the tightly related 2D / bit resolution capabilities that alpha channels and transparency effects deliver. But even designers / developers of largely non-graphic online applications were brought into the Z-dimension with the advent of later iterations of HTML and especially CSS. The concept of items “in front of or behind” others, and even more complex concepts such as masks and traveling mattes, have begun to enter the general vernacular of designers laying out 2D interfaces.
Which brings us, finally, to the point of this post.
Dimension 4 – Time / Motion
Motion graphics design is not a new discipline. It’s been around as long as film, but really began to come unto its own with television. The Superbowl these days could almost be described as motion graphics pornography (the medium is the message?).
But if you really think about it (again apart from digital video and gaming), motion graphics – and all of the design and practice principles from that world – have not really impacted mainstream (let’s say consumer) UI design until relatively recently. And I would argue that it is about to become a very important aspect of UI design going forward, and I wonder how many UI designers are ready for this.
Right. Now for all of you Flash aficionados out there thinking “what the hell are you talking about,” yeah, Flash has been a big part of the Internet for a long time now. And you can argue that Flash has been implementing awesome motion graphic interfaces for a long time.
And you’re right. But (and this will firmly identify me on the Flash fan/critic scale) I do not see Flash (or Silverlight or HTML5 yet for that matter) as industrial strength enough for the interfaces that we’re going to be building soon (and the one’s that – once full blown motion graphics interfaces start to reveal – will be demanded by consumers) for two reasons: performance and data binding. There are reams and reams of (heated) discussions regarding the stability and performance of Flash as a UI implementation layer. I’ve heard all the “guns don’t kill, people do” arguments that it’s not Flash’s fault, but bad programmers. And I don’t buy that argument. Personally. And I know Flex and Air are cool and all, but given the ease with which one can put together really high performance data applications with a host of languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.) on top of really high performance data stores (MySQL, Oracle, etc.) that scale like hell, I worry about introducing something seemingly less capable on the data binding front. (Go try and use Adobe’s own store – implemented in Flex – and tell me you don’t come away with performance and standards concerns.) These are proprietary technologies developed by one company that (as a die-hard Photoshop freak) of late has not impressed me with their development abilities.
I get easily derailed when Flash comes up – sorry.
Here’s the dénouement. I just saw the UI for the new, so-named, Windows Phone 7 Series the other day (find it here, worth seeing). And even with all of the interfaces I’ve seen (and created) over the years it was the first time I was so struck by the fact that we have clearly entered the age – with regard to UI design – of the fourth dimension, or the integral consideration of time and motion, including content.
If you’re an After Effects hack you can’t look at this interface without rattling off in your head all of the most fundamental text / graphic motion patterns in the discipline: pans, wipes, curls, zooms, reveals, easing, alpha channels, blah blah blah. It’s like a case project for a motion graphics class.
That’s not to say it’s bad. In fact, I think it’s great. Microsoft amazes me sometimes in that they can come up with some things that are so amazingly bad, and then produce something that is as almost amazingly good. There is a lot to like here, but if I had to put my finger on the one thing that struck me about this so it is how tightly dynamic data (date, time, contacts, photos, state, etc.) and time and motion are integrated. It’s not like static UI elements are the things that are moving around – it’s everything. Which is, I think, exactly what is going to be so challenging, and exciting, for designers in this next big leap.
As counterpart, and I’m planning to write separately about this to give it more due, take a look at the just out visualization of Wired Magazine – in close association with Adobe, using Adobe Air and Acrobat – running on the Apple iPad. And note carefully the difference that I’m seeing (maybe it’s only me): the “content” of the Wired interface is largely intact: the text, the graphics, the columns, the boxes – are largely static in relation to each other. Adobe I’m sure would claim that this is a great example of a “motion graphics interface”, but there are really only interface elements moving around, and monolithic content “chunks” – there’s been no demonstrable evolution of “content motion graphics”. Which I think this Windows Phone 7 Series demo actually starts to demonstrate – and in fact I think beats the iPhone in this regard.
Yes, what Adobe is after (intelligently) is something that they can roll out to the publishing world as a whole that is not some enormous sea change in process (Acrobat is certainly familiar territory), and what I am talking about will put just as much pressure on content creators (not just the UI designers), but bottom line I think that the UI breakthroughs that are going to catch our breath in the (near) future are in fact going to be those that deconstruct (and thus enable dynamic control) both UI container elements and content.
I don’t have the answers, but I think an early glimpse was just provided, at least to me, from – surprisingly (as a true Apple fan-boy) – none other than Microsoft.
You learn something new every day.
Leave a comment