What if you could re-invent the user interface?
June 29 2003
| Another thought I had while driving home
last night has been nagging me all day. Lake-Cook Road is a major
east-west artery around here. It's three through lanes in either
direction in some parts. At one particular intersection, there were
six different stoplights pointed in my direction. Are we that incompentent
that we need six signals? Well, maybe yes.
This made me reflect on a recent report that Chicago is going to install some "red light cameras" at some intersections where there are frequent traffic signal violations (people blowing through red lights). I just had to wonder, how, in this age of distractions, wouldn't it be interesting if we could invent a new way to provide traffic control signals? Would we still go with small vertical signals and colored lights? My color-blind father would definitely say no to that. What would the ideal traffic control device be? In 2003, the creative side of me thinks about some kind of radio-wave device that signaled something in the car itself. (Well....it's not that creative -- turns out that there are some tests being done on just such a thing). What about visual indicators, since we certainly need a fault-tolerant system, just-in-case? Words are a bad idea -- language problems. Icons, like are already used in walk/don't walk signals in many parts of the world? Not bad, but they'd surely be bigger than the three little lightbulbs we use now, right? (OK, that's not entirely true either -- many stoplights are being replaced with small matricies of LEDs that are brighter and don't burn out like regular lightbulbs). Now, aside from being a traffic (ok, all forms of travel) geek, how does this relate to anything? Well, it's a common problem in software, too. For Notes R5, when I was in product management, and Notes 6, when I was the brand manager, we dealt with these kinds of challenges frequently. I remember a vigorous debate once over whether we could change the text on a particular button, because "it might require retraining". !!!! There are constant requests to do things to, for example, merge the personal address book into the user's mailbox. All great ideas, but in mature market, it is a tug-of-war between doing things that make sense and maintaining the status quo. Now, where was that prototype for re-inventing e-mail.... |
I saw a glimpse of the "reinvented mail" client in Ken Biscotti's Lotus Mesaging Strategy webcast. I assume it is a bit older than the one we were talking about last week
I would assume most "knowledge workers" in this class would not ne too concerned about interface changes if the added functionality was worth it.
From my POV I want to be able to reach out of my organisation for info sources, not necessarily to nsf, intranet etc.
Cheers
Justin