Reflections on last lecture – Towards the future

When designing interfaces in the future it’s very important to try to always have everyone in mind, try to think that everyone is a potential user, so why exclude some because of our own ignorance? If we instead include everyone as potential users then the interface will most likely also be less cluttered and more user-friendly for everyone. This leads to a product that is not specialized for people with different impairment, but instead specialized for humans. No one feels excluded or stigmatized, at least no human beings. Not only is this beneficial for the users, it’s also beneficial for us developers, in the forms of more sold products, in good reputation, and of course a cleaner conscience and better karma. 

Even if we are not going to develop our own programs or devices, we might still be able to influence our eventual project members, work mates, or even our boss. These people will in their turn influence people around them, and before we know it we have started an avalanche of universal design and open mindedness.

The most important thing I’m going to bring with me from this course is to try to always have an open mind and see issues that arise only in other perspectives. As a future programmer/innovator/designer (fingers crossed!) I feel that I really have a chance to in a way influence the customers to have more open minds, even if it is without them even knowing it.

Lecture 11 – Reflection, Towards the future

When designing interfaces for the future it is important to not take the shortcuts to make a fast and cheap solution. It could be very tempting, but it is much more difficult to fix the solution afterwards than to make it right from the beginning. The technology is getting more and more advanced and that makes it even more important (and difficult) to make a good interface. A good interface is where you take away the unnecessary information and let the computer take more and more decisions on its own.

As I mentioned earlier the computers are going to have more and more control over our devices, that is why it is very important to teach the computers to do it the right way. Make complicated decision that seem natural for the user and not the opposite. Be able to customize the settings to adapt to the right need and impairments will be very important just as important as having adapted the interaction to different cultures.

I think it is more important to design for as many as possible instead of designing for just one purpose. In that way tools and solutions get cheaper and is more motivating for companies. It is hard to say how the future is going to look like, maybe robots will be the next personal assistant, but it is easy to forget that the most important thing for humans is being social and socially accepted. We cannot forget about what the needs are before finding solutions.

Reflection – The Future: Too crammed spaces

A lot of the things I have seen in this course that I think we should focus on in the future has a lot to do both with interaction, interface and information. In this case, I don’t see them as really different parts, and one thing I really have reacted to applies to all three.

The thing that really annoys me is when developers try to cram too much into a small space. Saving space is probably good when you don’t have much of it, but it really means that the thing will be much more difficult to user or understand. The most obvious example we saw was the stair climbing wheelchair which had a very crammed interface, but I think there can be many other examples.

The first thing I think developers really should think about is “do we really need all these options”? Probably not. I think that developers today tend to “get lost” in their own design, meaning that they try to implement everything at once, not thinking if it is really needed.

If the answer is that everything really is needed, then they need to figure out a good way to implement it so it would be understandable enough. I don’t really have a good suggestion to solve that problem, but I think their can be several really good ones.