Interface together with rapidly advancing technology
Over the past ten to twenty years, the domain of the interface together with rapidly advancing technology has led to fundamental changes in the field of interface design. Understanding the interface as a common boundary at which a user wishing to fulfill a certain task meets the product or artifact that is to perform that task, has increased the user’s involvement in the design process.
This can be a passive involvement by means of observation or the growing attention given to cognitive or ergonomic aspects, or active in the sense of co-authorship, determining content, or personalizing and customizing products.
Such an understanding of the interface inevitably leads to a fundamentally different concept of design in relation to developing hard- or software products.
Interface design goes far beyond the simple layout of external appearance, even if the full design is not evident to the viewer or user at the surface.
One main area of interface design is creating interfaces as access points to digital information. It is important that the link created between the user and the digital application contains a level of feedbackin other words, a system that can respond to a user’s command, communication, or selection. Interaction design, a significant part of interface design, is responsible for designing the performance of these processes in relation to the user over time. Interaction between humans and artifacts is the subject of research in man-machine interaction (MMI) and human- computer interaction (HCI). This results in a product having a multitude of operability or usability requirements.
The domain of operability touches upon diverse aspects such as perception, cognition, semantics, usability, ergonomics, and quality experience, which are significant to interface design and need to be integrated into the design process.
Large projects contain important interfaces with other disciplines.
Successful interface design is a key factor in how increasingly complex, system-integrated products such as cellular phones, web sites, cars, and computers are accepted by the user (Convergence, System). Interface design develops and designs user situations in different user contexts, so as to achieve an optimal user interface. Today, this usually involves touch sensitive monitor (screen)-based communication and information systems.
Involving user context is done via a monitor as a graphical user interface (GUI); it tries to determine which software the user interacts with and under which circumstances, how different media can be used in combination to increase effectiveness and the quality of an experience, into which system individual media are integrated, and how this can be made comprehensible and easy for a user to operate (Screen Design).
When Vannevar Bush in 1945 laid the foundations for hypertext with his memory extender (memex), he also introduced a major interface design metaphor by using an ordinary desk as a document administration device (the desktop). A good twenty years later, Douglas Engelbart devised the now standard, indispensable computer mouse as a way to intuitively and directly access abstract information beyond the monitor.
When Alan Kay in the 1970s at Xerox Parc developed a method to transform the abstract command line interface into a graphical user interface, consisting of layers of windows based on real-world metaphors, the WIMP paradigm (windows, icons, menu, pointer) was born. This created many different areas of application for interface design which involve every machine or application that is used to operate or control media.
Information design is the structuring and formal design of information (meaning sensorial coding) in order to transform data into clear and accessible information.
The objective is to discover new aspects and perspectives of content, to reduce complexity by avoiding intricate forms of presentation, and to display a clearer, simplified understanding of the situation to be presented. The interaction with this information integrates information design with interface design. In this way, information systems for public spaces are created, as well as for the Internet (Web Design), portable terminals, or exhibitions.
An increase in digitalization and media developments will make information the most important resource for interface design. When Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “information architect” at the end of the 1970s, he was imagining a designer who structured inherent patterns into data so as to display complex information in the clearest way possible.
Today, information architects are responsible for structuring complex information, and developing sitemaps for web sites or the menu structure for cellular phones, electronic program manuals, or software applications. Since information is no longer only structured statically, but reacts dynamically as a structure to patterns of use (making contextrelated suggestions for content or functions), developing an interface “backbone” requires a dialog between interface designers, interaction designers, engineers, and users.
As a rule, usage cases are formulated and modeled that describe sections or fragments of utilization processes, which are then displayed in usage scenarios that anticipate and demonstrate the needs of individual users. These scenarios and personal developments form an interface with the field of service design. Interfaces enable information to be provided, accessed, and applied. At the end of the 1990s, however, the ever increasing mass of information led to complexity, which knowledge management systems had to untangle and make accessible and comprehensible again.
Content-management systems were developed for the digital administration of information. They separate and store information structurally, independent of formal aspects of presentation.
Today, integrating context is becoming more important, making context management using metadata (keywords, prioritization, use information, and so on) an essential aspect of structuring and accessing information.
Given that the underlying structures are rarely apparent to the user, interface design develops visual and audiovisual means of presentation that make it easier to apprehend the information clearlyand in the future may use other senses as well. The first andmost importantmetaphor used by interfaces is the desktop. Real-worldmetaphors were applied to the computer to make it seemless abstract: the layers of documents in windows, deleting data by dropping it in the trash, or archiving documents in files.
The exponential increase in storage capacity and, with that, stored data, causes these metaphors to lose their transferability because in the real world, files do not contain more and more subfiles, and CDs or storage media are not dropped into the trash.
Consequently a variety of graphic interfaces were created, such as tree maps or the hyperbolic tree, which represent data and certain qualities (metadata) and make them accessible. At the University of Maryland, computer scientist Ben Shneiderman worked on developing innovative forms of presentation that went beyond metaphors based in reality.
The computer’s surge in popularity made accessibility a crucial success factor for applicationsfrom web applications to expert systems and operating systems. Mapping data allowed systems to be structured clearly and to make data intuitively accessible and operableindependent of real world metaphors.
Cognitive psychology and real world experiences transferred to digital applications (gravity, surround sound, using blue for spatial depth) contributed to this development. Today mapping, especially when displaying complex data such as stock-market information, is vital for articulating an overview and making informed comments, without having to go into too much detail.
This was necessary because, regarding the maze of interconnected content, users had to make several selections before arriving at the information they wanted. A well-designed interface allows users to go directly to the information they need, without navigating through many levels.
Hypertext or hypermedia navigation can be used to allow users to go to a conclusive level of content that can be augmented by links at any point. This procedure requires strategic orchestration to overcome the conventional, sequential narrative structure. A useful comparison can be made with literature where, much earlier, some writers like James Joyce had experimented with and even abandoned linear narrative techniques.
With this in mind, discourses developed concerning “flow” (formulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) or “experience design” (by Brenda Laurel and Nathan Shedroff) that had a major effect on interface design.