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The User Experiences Of The Future
Patrick Griffin writes "The way that we interact with technology is almost as important as what that technology does. Productivity has been improved greatly over the years as we've adapted ourselves and our tools to technological tasks. Just the same, the UI experience of most hardware and software often leaves novice users out in the cold. The site 'Smashing Magazine' has put together a presentation of 'some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques seem very futuristic, and are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they might become ubiquitous over the next years.'"
The Star Trek version of a teleporter is essentially a suicide booth. It rips you apart and then makes a copy on the other end. Do not want.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
You're joking right? A fax machine's UI sucks. In my experience very few people, when faced with sending a fax for the first time, have managed to do so successfully. They always need help.
When you approach a fax machine, there is no obvious starting action to take. Do you dial first, or scan the pages first? Do you scan the pages one at a time, or can you put them down all at once? When you dial the number, there is no feedback that anything is happening. No sound of dialing, no sound of handshake. Just some cryptic messages like TX that mean absolutely nothing to a novice. Eventually the machine will spit out a page that, you hope, says somewhere on it STATUS: SUCCESS. If you do run into difficulty, you have to find the dead-tree manual to help you, because the messages on the little LCD display don't help much.
A fax machine's UI is about as user friendly as a linux shell without man pages.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I think part of the problem in these various usability debates is that a good UI for learning and bringing in newbies is not the most effective solution once one has greater needs.
This 'one size fits all' mentality is the issue. We need interfaces that scale from basic to advanced so the basic users doing get slammed with all the advanced stuff and advanced users don't find themselves without the tools they need to actually do their work.