Last Friday, a funny-looking guy from Oblong mentioned during his introductory remarks at one of the UCLA Mobile Media symposium’s panels a strange bent he’d been noticing among students and practitioners to accept as UI gospel designs emitted by the two major OS manufacturers. What he had no time to go on to say (but should have anyway): the phenomenon isn’t ascribable to the individual; it feels, rather, like a pandemic of ingrained assumption — at the aggregate tech-humanity level — in which we all of us can’t help wallowing.
That assumption is to do with where good UI ideas come from and who gets to have them (the ideas).
The sole dominant (universal, actually) GUI is twenty-five years old, was introduced by one of the incumbents, and was copied by the other as slavishly as law, talent, and pride would allow. Already a problem, no? A monosetup doesn’t promote a mental model in which there’s evolution, an ecosystem, a dialogue. Because there was no GUI before that, we haven’t even had a pattern that suggests “you get a new one every three decades”. And yet we should make it our job to assume that, and to assure that, and while we’re at it to get itchy every decade. We’re currently coming up on twenty years late.
Touchscreens that accommodate multiple points of contact got rediscovered recently. Products involving these modalities have been released — some of them to commercial success, some of them to PR success — and this in turn has suddenly launched large-scale public interest in novel interface. The interest is welcome.
The shame, really, is in presupposing that the incumbents have some advantage in designing radically new interfaces. There’s certainly reason to expect they’d have an advantage in asserting new interfaces, but that’s hardly the same thing. Yet even there it’s unsimple: an incumbent has a responsibility (read: fiscal incentive) not to alienate or confuse or discomfit existing customers. So in fact that translates to a formidable disincentive to offer anything too radical.
Enough about them. What we want is encouragement against being discouraged from designing and building freely. Here’s an axiom: a new UI that’s a vast leap forward must also be sweepingly different. That’s not to say that an incrementally different UI couldn’t be a swollen commercial triumph. But such swelling is not what we should be after (not all of us, at least). Here’s something between an axiom and an assertion: a vast leap forward is possible. The leap’s vast, so it won’t look like a traditional GUI with some touch stuff layered on. Therefore, we haven’t seen it yet.
That ought be all we need to know.
A last part is that a giant incumbent company has about the same chance of being the one to find it as International Business Machines had of inventing and popularizing the GUI: which is to say: greater than zero: and it is also to say: less that one.