I have two criticisms of the article:<p>1. Every story is a 'just so' story where the way the system works is exactly the way the user wants the system to work. Great, it's like putting a button front and center on your app and the user wants to push that button and look! It's right there! Awesome. Except I don't want to push that button, I want to push the other button that's now hidden away because the designer is striving for "No UI". The new minimalist interface is now actively fighting me. What if I don't want my car to unlock when I approach it?<p>2. Using AI is a "step 2: ???" solution, and the flaw with it is best exemplified by the columnist who bought a pregnancy book for a pregnant friend on Amazon... and now his Amazon suggestion stream is now still filled with baby clothes that are age appropriate for his friend's baby, years later. For every adaptive step the non-interface takes on the basis of past behaviour, it's a step away from future behaviour that's different than past behaviour.<p>I suppose my criticisms come down to the fact that the article doesn't seem to acknowledge that design trade-offs are a normal part of interface work. It strongly implies there's a hallowed land where every use case is obvious and accounted for and we all just "do". Annoying, in the same way that we all get annoyed when another framework comes along and is in its silver bullet phase where it's the awesomest solution to everything you need it to do.
I found the article somewhat light on useful examples; however the premise is very interesting, so I would like to bring a couple of my own examples to <i>the table</i>:<p>In a restaurant named "The Herb Farm" in Seattle area you don't pay when you eat, you pay before the dinner, when making a reservation by phone (the menu is prix-fixe). So when you're done eating you just walk out - no waiting for the check, no computing tips, none of that nonsense that should not be part of a pleasant dinner. It's incredibly liberating, in a way I would never understood if I was only <i>told</i> about it.<p>For another example, when you arrive to the restaurant "Canlis" they help you out of the car, and then you walk right into the place. When you're done eating, you walk right out and your car is already back there. They spot you on the way to the door and reshuffle the cars so that yours is at the front. So you just walk out, get in the car and drive off. As it turned out, searching for a place to park, parking, pocketing the keys etc etc is a huge mental overhead. I only realized that when I was liberated from it. The typical "valet" service actually does nothing for me - there is still overhead of asking for your car, waiting for it to be brought, tipping the valet. Meh.<p>Both places are charging a pretty penny for their services, so they can afford the "luxury" of good service, including good wages to the employees who make it possible. Sadly, neither does both of these things, which is still an open niche in Seattle dining. But more to the point at hand: where the restaurants make good service at cost of quality labor, computer systems could do the same at cost of good engineering, that is remove unnecessary delays and accidental complexity.
While having no interface is a nice idea, I think that there's also something to be said for "Make common things easy, rare things possible." That is, it's great to try to eliminate the need for an interface, but you can't assume or even expect that you'll always succeed, so you have to have an interface anyway.<p>Also, a lot of famous security vulnerabilities like the fact that Windows will execute things on a memory stick without being asked, are the result people trying for no interface. Having merchants billing you without you consenting seems really, really sketchy and maybe the video addresses this in a way that would satisfy me, but I'm sceptical.
Minor details aside, this is a spot-on analysis in the grand scheme of things.<p>Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, they're good at logic, they can make decisions. It's our job as programmers to make the do more and allow us to do less.<p>I'm tired of complexity. I don't <i>want</i> a car that has a touch screen—I want one with a knob that's tactile and has a blue-to-red gradient that makes sense and only controls the thing it looks like it controls. I don't want to think about it. I don't want it to take three steps and two cluttered screens.<p>And if my fridge is going to be smart, I want it to be smart about being a fridge. I want it to do one thing smartly: make things cold. If it's going to do something else smartly, I want it to be relevant to keeping my food, so I don't know, figure out when I need new milk by allowing me to scan the barcode when I buy it. Then how about making it available on my phone so I can answer the age-old question "Do I need to buy milk?" when I'm at the grocery store. That might actually be useful.<p>But for pete's sake, if it has twitter, I will not buy it.<p>Computers should simplify our lives. If it adds complexity, screw you, start over and try again.
The Google Wallet flow they describe is not correct. All you need to do is have the screen on (not unlocked) and hold the phone near the NFC reader. If you're not recently-authenticated, you need to type your PIN. That's it.<p>You do not need to unlock your phone or navigate to the Wallet app, and you don't need to select the credit card to use at payment time. Also worth noting is that tap-and-pay works even without a data connection.<p>The real lessons to learn from this are: people are paranoid about paying for things ("how will my phone know to make a payment if I'm not in the app?"), and people don't read documentation (the first few times you use Wallet, it's explained exactly how you make a payment).<p>One last thing to think about: creepiness. As a society, we have the technology to predict exactly what you are going to buy and when, and we can use cameras to recognize your face. So if you usually buy a latte every morning, the coffee shop could just make it in advance, and you could walk into the store and pick it up. The security tape would see your face picking up your coffee, and automatically deduct the money from your account. But I'm guessing that the HN crowd, despite their desire for convenience and technology, would <i>hate</i> that for privacy concerns. Do you really want your coffee shop tracking your every move? Who will they share that information with?<p>(Why is the complete lack of an interface creepy? Because nothing else we do is completely lacking in interface; usually you do something to get a result -- doing nothing to get the same result is weird.)
This is a well-trod point, but one that's always good to be reminded of. A similar argument is made in The Design of Everyday Things - if your interface needs an instruction manual, even if it's only one word (for instance the word "pull" on a door) then the interface is not doing its job.<p>I'd highly recommend DOET for anyone interested in this sort of thing.
Worst interface is one that's trying to learn about my habits without having a broader knowledge about my personality and the world as a whole. I don't want my axe to adapt to my hand and to my way of using it. Most of all I want my axe to be reliably predictable.<p>So no, thank you, no self-learning climate control systems, microwaves or lawn mowers.
Is that list of steps to use Google Wallet in this article correct? If so, that wasn't the promise of NFC at all! I have an Android phone on which I use the legacy Japanese NFC system which doesn't require waking up the phone at all (it even works if the battery is depleted).<p>He says that tapping a device against another one is undesirable, but I think people like that kind of "I have to do <i>this</i> for money to disappear out of my account" reassurance.
While no interface is better, it is not always the simplest or the most utilitarian.<p>The Mercedes proximity based, keyless entry system is actually a complex digital abstraction over a mechanical key/lock.<p>Mercedes has to address a bunch of security concerns such as preventing an adversary from sniffing my key information through my jacket pocket, digitally cracking codes, etc. Since the system tries to protect you from locking your key in the car, more technological components need to be thrown into the mix to detect if the key is inside the car. If the driver has to reach into his pocket to turn on the ignition it would defeat the purpose of going "keyless" so presumably the ignition system also gets a few layers of complexity. The cost of whole system would also go up. Repair and maintenance don't sound so appealing either. The whole thing can fail in a lot more ways.<p>I am not inferring it's a bad idea. It very well might become commoditized technology some time in the future and pave the way for other interesting possibilities.<p>I prefer utilitarian design which is more concerned with simplicity through and through rather than just minimizing the footprint for the user interface.
The title is wrong. I understand how the development community has gotten hung up on the absurd GUIs and CLIs we've had to use but that's not what the word interface means.<p><pre><code> Interface: A point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc., meet and interact.
</code></pre>
A door handle is an interface, a burglar alarm is an interface, etc. The term you're actually looking for is "invisible interface" instead of in-your-way interfaces. But if you wish to have the ability to interact with a system, you cannot remove its interface...
One thing that mustn't be over-looked with interfaces that 'learn about your behavior' is they can lock into a 'local maxima' and can be difficult to retrain without resetting to factory defaults. - If your lifestyle changes, can the interface keep up?
This whole thing sounds an awful lot like Bret Victor's “Magic Ink” paper (that's a compliment): <a href="http://worrydream.com/MagicInk" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/MagicInk</a><p>If you like the ideas in the OP, you owe it to yourself to chew through Bret's paper. A lot of the same ideas, expanded and thought through.
The best interface is hiding all the steps of a complex process and saying you did away with the interface.<p>No steps = easy to debug when it goes wrong. You just point at it and loudly whine: "It's not working!" then nobody fixes it because all the back end is "magic".
As far as ergonomics I always liked the Mercedes door handles better than those of some other cars, where you can only open the door by gripping from underneath. Interface design and ergonomics go hand in hand.<p>I think the iPhone is a good example with its one button design and size, as opposed to clunkier cellphones with 3 or more buttons.
Designers often forget about this in their urge to overdesign and show-off. That's probably why you should have a strictly UI/UX person on your team, who can say no and strip the clutter.
The problem with "AI" and endusers is we humans are flawed enough to have a large and only semi-effective science and industry focusing on what amounts to interface failures between "intelligences". Abnormal psych, couples counseling, that sort of thing.<p>True, you do need to worry about the engineering and stats and this might be close to solved for some trivial problems.<p>Yes you also need to worry about the interactions between AI and "normal" people and this is nowhere near solved even for trivial problems but its been slowly improving for decades.<p>The biggest problem is debugging interactions between AI and "AB-normal" people. How should the AI react when rubbed up against a OCD person, or a psychopath, or a developmentally disabled enduser?<p>This I believe to be the fundamental failure mode for AI in enduser products, probably enforced by the greedy legal system. If you ignore the most vulnerable members of the population you knowingly released a product that kills them, thats not going to turn out well. Or you can hyperoptimize it such that your lawnmower is better at dealing with psychopaths than the smartest human, in which case its hyperregulated by the medical system up to unaffordable cost.
I don't like the idea of AI and a computer in everything I own. Who stores/owns all that information? It also seems like a completely unnecessary security risk(people spying on you by hacking into your fridge :P).<p>The solution is a lot simpler, don't make me use a computer for everything. I can open my car with my key, Pay using money(or even a bank or credit card).<p>Twitter in you're car and Apps on the fridge only exist because of the App hype. I don't think they will last.
<a href="http://www.cooper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/nouisystems_goldenkrishna.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.cooper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/nouisystems...</a><p>Yeah, right. At some point on that curve the UI would grow arms and make me my favorite breakfast every morning. Objects in the world are innately limited by the causes they have in their origin. An pear tree can only ever produce pears unless what are encoded in its seed are changed.
The core thought is of value and basically the direction in which HCI is headed.<p>Other than that, wow. As a UX designer, I would expect the author to show more critical thinking when evaluating the interfaces like a car dashboard and refrigerator. Put those into context as you conveniently do with interaction patterns like opening car doors and paying with ewallets.
From August of this year, but still nice to see this again.<p>I don't even need to read the blog post. The title says it all. djb wrote about this in the docs for qmail many years ago.<p>My idea of a great "user experience":<p>I switched it on/started it up, it did what it's supposed to do, in a predictable span of time, without asking me questions or requiring me to fiddle with anything.
My response to the article: <a href="http://wireframes.linowski.ca/2012/12/calling-your-bull-the-best-interface-is-no-interface/" rel="nofollow">http://wireframes.linowski.ca/2012/12/calling-your-bull-the-...</a> I think it's stretched. Interfaces still have good characteristics.