By Ian
With Apple’s recent success, a much higher premium has been put on design and user interface in consumer applications than ever before. In many cases, taking the idea behind old apps or old concepts, and putting a new spin on the design can drive huge success.
Companies like Nest (www.nest.com) are able to essentially do away with all controls do to some recent advances in machine learning. Simply through user input and temperature control they adjust the internal programming and schedule of the thermostat. There is no programming required, it just ‘magically’ responds to you will. Machine learning advances have made extremely dynamic and personalized UIs like this almost commonplace, at least with technology like Facebook’s EdgeRank. I would also put iRobot’s Roomba in a similar category.
The touchscreen UI of most modern cellphones and tablets really hasn’t been fully realized yet. Clear (http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/14/clear-why-this-simple-to-do-list-app-has-everyone-talking/) is a nice demo of the possibilities of an app without buttons (it relies entirely on gestures and text input). Swype for Android re-imagines how the keyboard would operate on a touch device. But there is so much more that can be down with touchscreens, like this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface.
Technologies like the Kinnect or OpenTLD (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9G8DT-GkyQ, https://github.com/zk00006/OpenTLD) are beginning a new wave of three-dimensional interaction. Along these lines, some undergrads at a recent hackathon made a spherical capacitive touch interface for their computer. Apple is rumored to be planning a future AppleTV, hinted at in Steve Jobs’ biography, that uses full three dimensional control via real-life gestures.
The final quick mention goes to Dropbox, for their amazing feat of essentially eliminating a UI entirely. You put stuff in the folder, it just magically syncs. And their folder works exactly the same as every other folder on your computer. The simplicity of how the user interacts with Dropbox is astounding, and as we move towards borader audiences for computer products (especially people like my mom, or my 3 year old nephew) a strong emphasis on UI can make an opportunity where is didn’t seem like there was one before.
Specialized Hardware (as a subset of innovative UI):
This doesn’t really fit as nicely, but I already wrote it up, and thought it was interesting, so I figured I’d include it anyways.
There is a growing consumer demand for far more specialized forms of hardware-software integration. Companies like ELaCarte (www.elacarte.com) are taking advantage of the lower cost of hardware to make digital menus. And Pebble, a $100 E-Watch, (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android) recently became the fastest growing Kickstarter project ever, and has become a new platform for app development. Computers and processing used to be slow and expensive, tot he point that every program had to go through your computer. With the iPhone, Apple began to push the boundaries of what kind of specialized devices could run their own operating system, and thus offer much more functionality than simple hardware alone. With Pebble, this ability to combine hardware and software is getting smaller and smaller. We are already starting to see touchscreens integrated with cars and even airplanes (if you haven’t flown Virgin yet, you really should). Where does it end? Who knows. But there are certainly still many places to expand, and many opportunities waiting to be capitalized on. I mean, my coffee cup doesn’t have a computer in it yet.
(I’m gonna park this E-Paper announcement here, just because it seems super futuristic and awesome and is technically hardware: http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/lg-e-paper/)
