STLUX: Interfaces of Futures Past

by March 14, 2014

At STLUX2014 in St.Louis MO 2014, Morgan Noel shared lessons learned from futuristic movie interfaces. Here's my notes from his talk Interfaces of Futures Past:

  • Media culture influences what we expect from our interfaces.
  • We've been trained to expect: hacking, virtual reality, voice interface, and gestural interface.
  • Typing is boring no matter what you put around it. We want to get users to the get stuff as soon as possible.
  • Great experiences are magical. People want them to be seamless, which requires a lot of work on the part of user experience designers.
  • If a computer interacts like a computer, people expect it to behave like a computer. If a computer interacts like a person, you expect it to behave like a person.
  • There are 135 most commonly used words in the English language. 50% of the million or so word we use. But 30,000 programmed responses were all it took for the chatbot "Alice" to beat a turing test and be deemed "human-like." That's not a lot of effort.
  • Current gesture systems have no common language of interaction, but there's room to build, grow and create using cheap tools like the Leap Motion.
  • People want things to be great and exciting but also easy.