Viewpoints

About This Technology

User interfaces are the links between users and technologies. They mediate people's relationships with computers, cars, entertainment electronics, office automation, technology in public space, and handheld devices. Elegant user interfaces inspire loyalty—as in the cases of Apple's iPod and Nintendo's video-game consoles. Meanwhile, poor UI designs impede technology growth when people have trouble using gadgets—as in the cases of navigating menus to configure a cell phone's Bluetooth connection and setting up remote access to files stored on a home PC. Business decision makers and their customers increasingly aim to improve the quality of experience when using technology to communicate, be productive, and have fun. Some businesses are interested in the promise of advanced UI technologies such as gesture recognition, motion holograms, and computer dialogue systems that support humanlike conversation quality. Other businesses aim to improve products and services via evolutionary use of technologies such as touch screens, force feedback, and immersive interfaces such as motion platforms. UIs—which people sometimes call human-machine interfaces, human-computer interfaces, and other names—first came into many people's awareness when graphical user interfaces emerged for Macintosh and Windows PCs in the 1980s. GUIs made it possible for people without a computer-science background to take advantage of information technology. Good usability, attractive industrial design, and innovative user-experience engineering promise to enable further breakthroughs in market development for handheld devices, connected homes, connected cars, connected workplaces, and smart spaces in public venues such as cinemas, arcades, and transportation hubs.

The discipline of user-interface engineering covers a wide array of activities, from basic research to practical Web-page design. Developments entail core technologies—such as sensors, actuators, control surfaces, and display devices—as well as highly integrated systems such as cars, aircraft, consumer goods, public-information kiosks, and, of course, everything that an electronics store sells. Services, too, have user interfaces, often consisting of Web sites, call centers with interactive-voice-response and speech-recognition systems, interactive TV menus, and other innovations. Even a company's brand is sometimes associated with a distinctive and recognizable look and feel, as in the cases of Apple, Microsoft, and Sony. A number of advanced-user-interface technologies are on the horizon. The social environment of the Internet—which people sometimes call Web 2.0—may be evolving toward a shared virtual 3-D world along the lines of Second Life. Shared 3-D worlds are the current instance of the promised ideal of virtual reality—which would accurately simulate the experience of being in an imaginary environment. True VR systems typically include body sensors and head-mounted displays or special rooms that contain multiple high-definition displays that show images of an environment that responds to the user's movements. But users have been disappointed in the realities of uncomfortable goggles and gloves, slow graphics rendering, and very high prices. Similarly, science-fiction stories often tell of holographic images projected into free space—but the real-world price and performance of 3-D displays do not match the science-fiction fantasy. Despite people's love for UI innovations such as Nintendo's Wii, technology remains a long way from satisfying the human desire to escape from our flawed world into a virtual world that is solely for our enjoyment.

Instead, developments like the iPod, the Wii, and the 3-D Web illustrate the importance of simply improving design practices to catch up with what technology already enables. Consider Google Maps, which popularized zoomable satellite images with annotations. Context-sensitive annotated information is evolving toward augmented reality for car navigation and cell phones. Users may also increase their use of zoomable interfaces—say, zooming in on an image that represents on-the-job workflow and zooming out to see all concurrent work-related projects in a matrix. With the rise in enthusiasm for virtual worlds, expect many products and services to implement 3-D user interfaces and controllers that respond to gestures and body motion, taking advantage of users' familiarity with navigating video games. But user-interface innovations will not stop with 3-D images on a 2-D screen. R&D labs are busy developing stereoscopic displays and free-space holograms that may require years to arrive in typical homes but will find initial use among enthusiasts of video games and home theater as well as in retail environments and other public venues that draw attention to consumer-product promotions and high-ticket items like cars. Labs are also working to extend the screen area of cell phones via onboard video projectors, flexible e-paper, or connections for displays built into eyewear. And advanced research aims to create speech interfaces that resemble holding a real conversation with a human. Meanwhile, expect increasing use of speech recognition in everyday applications like voice mail and improvements in natural-speech generation (synthesis or sample splicing). And above all, expect inventors, using diverse technologies, to produce unexpected innovations, possibly by drawing on current R&D in wearable electronics, haptic interfaces, machine vision, biometrics, emotion recognition, exoskeletons, neural and bioelectric interfaces, and cognitive enhancers.