Kyle VanHemert wrote a piece for Wired Magazine that considered the forward-thinking computer operating system portrayed in the film Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix.
VanHemert believes we’re heading towards a future in which technology will “dissolve” into everyday life. A future perhaps without screens (and clunky hardware). This is an intriguing concept, considering our current obsession with smartphones shows no signs of waning.
Mobile voice apps seem logical in theory, but are really just a sort of tech novelty at the moment. Siri’s numerous shortcomings equal the crudeness of voice recognition apps available on most Android phones.
The idea of speaking to your computer, rather than typing things out on a touch screen or physical keyboard, sounds great but how does that work in a noisy public environment or open concept office space?
A future without keyboards is a popular idea perpetuated in many science-fiction stories. The notion we’ll be talking our way through the Web instead of typing and clicking things we see rendered on a screen seems inevitable at some point in the future.
Designers of screen-based digital products will have to eventually rethink their role and what it means to craft a compelling user experience.
What are the desirable attributes of an OS that does not employ a GUI? In the film Her clearly it’s Scarlett Johansson’s voice. Wouldn’t you rather interact with a Scarlett Johansson-esque sounding voice when sifting through your morning email rather than the mind numbing artificially generated types we hear in, say, car GPS nav systems. You know, that slightly creepy voice: monotone, completely devoid of any inflection; cold and unsympathetic when we deviate from the pre-programmed turn-by-turn directions. Recalibrating…recalibrating…
Visual and audible affordances aside, a UI that gets out of your way and allows you to accomplish a specific task quickly (e.g. pay a credit card bill, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant, delete a file) is the measure of effective UX.
But if your phone’s OS or car GPS is going to sound like Scarlett Johansson you might get distracted and go off on tangent conversations like Joaquin Phoenix did, which means you’ll never get anything done or possibly rear-end the driver in front of you.
The OS in Her isn’t just a pretty voice, it’s inquisitive and seems to intelligently anticipate and prioritize Theodore’s needs (the character played by Joaquin). What current OS can make those claims? Not Windows 8.1, not OS X Mavericks, not Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, not Android 4.4 KitKat.
Yes, wearable voice-enabled devices are very interesting, but also clumsy and primitive in capability at present —though well-intentioned. What we experience today could be viewed as the equivalent of horse and carriage technology when we think about the utopian concepts presented in the film Her.
UXD in its current state as a core discipline of software design and modern Web application development seems to focus disproportionately on what people see rather than what people might need to do. While the old axiom attractive things work better is a design principle few would dismiss, what of design’s most established tenets: form follows function —what then, when there is no form?
image credit: Leo Roubos