Amazing is the new normal.
Just let that sink in. When it comes to technology, people have failed to realize and are not amazed at technological advances since amazing has become the new normal.
The user expects for technology to be simple and that it just works without really knowing how.
Our lives have now been shaped through the interaction with software on our multiple mobile devices. Therefore, people want to buy once and use everywhere.
If you think real hard, and try to remember a dark era about five years ago, where programmers wrote a program that was installed and executed on a single user’s computer. And depending on whether the programmer was brave, they may target creating a program for two or even three desktop operating systems. This was a more simplistic lifestyle for the programmer.
Nowadays, the user expects to buy once and use on all of their mobile devices.
At the BibleTech conference, Eli Evans, from Logos Bible Software, tackles this question, “what does a life in the clouds look like when you are a designer for today’s distributed computing lifestyle?” Evans argues that for designers they must design for human use. They must find the sweet spot of designing. The software must be a user-centered approach to development in which users and their goals are the driving force behind a project’s design.
Evans’ rightly argues by stating, “users expect to coordinate activities on multiple devices in order to accomplish a single task, and what’s worse, they think that’s a completely natural and sensible way to go about it. Worse yet, they’re right. If you don’t have “an app for that” yet — get cracking!”
Because of the great demand from consumers to have their software to be mobile, Evans acknowledges the two main questions each designer must ask when making software available for mobile devices are:
- What does the user value?
- What can the designer deliver?
The goal of the designer is to find the overlap between the two questions, which Evans calls “the sweet spot.”
A life in the clouds is extremely attractive to the user and a great idea. Evans uses Netflix as an example of the sweet spot since Netflix is stripping down to the core of the experience for a successful cloud lifestyle for the user.
To hit “the sweet spot”, Evans challenges designers to learn from Netflix and other companies doing well with cloud technology by keeping the concepts of the software the same even if you change the user-interface from platform to platform. Evans supports inconsistent user-interfaces, because “people will learn new interfaces, but they do not want to learn new concepts.”
He goes on to say that “designers must focus on writing services, which can be bundled on a device, and not just write applications.” Evans focused on the importance of conceptual continuity over interface consistency. He argues that “It is a natural difference between using a mouse and a touch screen, but a new concept throws a person off”
The end goal of Evans lecture encouraged designers to help people be awesome by empowering the user through hitting the sweet spot between what the user values and what you can deliver as a designer.
Cloud computing and creating the infrastructure is really hard and the user will most likely never realize how amazing of a program you created, but Evans challenges designers no to create programs that are easy rather create what the users want and are excited about using.
Trevor says
Good post. There are some lines that really jumped out at me because they applied to some of the things going on in my brain right now. Basically programmers are having to deal with unmovable, difficult people too. It is interesting to see how they are approaching it.
Graham says
Good stuff. I think it’s time I learned how to develop iOS and Android apps…