原创 UI design: Throwing out the baby with the bathwater

At the recent 2013 Consumer Electronics Show and at previous ESC DESIGN shows, I have seen the radical impact of new human-machine technologies on the way humans interface with their computers. This shift is not only occurring in mobile smartphones, wireless tablets and even dekstop PCs, but in a variety of embedded devices in consumer, industrial and automotive apps as well.

The new UI technologies they now use run the gamut: capacitive switch based sensors, 3D, gesture and hover, MEMS-based accelerometers and vision-based systems that can see and understand.

The flood of new UI alternatives available to the developer has both its upsides and its downsides. On the positive side, the new user interface alternatives designed to either supplement, or replace, the traditional graphical user interface are in some cases making computer based systems much more accessible. On the negative, in many cases device designers seem to have adopted a "throw out the baby with the bathwater" strategy in their enthusiasm for the new user interface alternatives.

Without taking into account what they have learned about user habits and preferences in the decades that the traditional GUI has been in use, they have moved willy-nilly to the new HMI alternatives, often with disastrous results.

By ignoring the basic principles of user interface design learned in the era of when graphical UIs were the main mechanism for such interaction, the result as far as I can see, is confusion and rejection. Using one of these new gesture, hover, etc. enabled devices is very much like being asked to join an elite secret society and then being asked to learn a unique set of "secret handshakes" to gain access to the secret society's meetings or to talk fellow members.

It is good practice to review the fundamentals of good user design before you jump into the new world of capacitive touch, gesture, hover and 3D user interfaces. And even when the UI you've designed does everything it should, many of the new alternatives, such as those based capacitive touch sensors, may be ruled out because of the environment in which they must operate. For example, because of the nature of the touch sensor environment, such things as electrostatic discharge and electromagnetic interference are now only a fingertip away from your system's electronics.

There are many new UI design modalities being investigated that will further test the ability of embedded system designers to balance the new with the old. I would like to hear from you about your challenges and how you addressed them.