I think it's critical for us all to start rethinking how we build interfaces.

One thing about Ford/Microsoft Sync is that it is entirely designed to expect the user to be doing something other than thinking about how to make it do what you want (like driving)

With the coming onslaught of Win7, mobile devices, better voice and pen recognition as well as multitouch we need to stop thinking about mice and keyboards as the sole primary inputs.

Personally I am delighted we are finally able to use these reliably. Microsoft’s voice development team used to be known as the “wreck a nice beach” group… Today, the Speech SDK is very usable.  My primary input for Twitter is transferring to voice from my iPhone.  I never really thought the iPhone was a critical device until I actually bought one… I use it 100x more than my iPod Touch.  Gee, there’s no mouse on that thing, the interface suddenly needs to be different.  Right-Click? what’s that?

We have a lot to learn about input and information overload.  The web is really starting to suck badly for many people such as my mother.

She was trying to upload some pictures to share with the family and couldn't figure out how to coordinate between Explorer, Picasa, EasyShare and Gallery that all the different people were using, nor should she have to.  All this stuff is FAR too overwhelming for the non-Geek. Try explaining why an Album in Picasa isn't the same as a Folder in Explorer and one program puts things in Public Pictures and another in My Pictures.  Which click, right or left… single, double or triple click… this is madness.

We might also suggest Search but all the pictures are intelligently named things like img10472.jpg, etc. So what does she search for?  Teaching her to rename everything when importing is not so fun either.  Can she get Geo-Location on the camera? Maybe, but also limited use in searching. I have thousands of picture and have no idea who is in most of them.  Why can’t my Photo Browser recognize when I say “That’s Jake and Kelly on a Horseback Ride in Cave Creek”? Then promptly update the Metadata of photo its displaying?  It already has the date, so now a search might be worth something.

So what do we as designers and developers do? Alienate all non technically degreed users?  I have a friend from high-school that subscribes to my Facebook page, which echoes my Twitter feed. I laugh out loud nearly every time he replies that he has no idea what the heck I am saying… ever, which is frequent.  Computers are supposed to be tools, not instruments of torture or mass destruction.

I think it is up to us geeks to make these things more intelligent so not only is it easier for the user to shuffle stuff around from 3 or 4 cameras, notebooks, phones, music players, game devices, cars, TVs, etc. but at the same time make it so a developer of this stuff doesn’t lose their mind trying to accommodate the ever increasing demands of users who have no idea how to use any of this software nor any time to learn the intricacies of the interfaces.

One thing is for sure. The days of the dedicated PC are over. Sharing is important. No one cares how organized my files are or what they are named but I still need to find things. We need to be able to move important items from one place to another without hassle, often someplace other people have access to them who don’t care about your organizational skills.

I don't always type emails from a desktop computer any more. Sometimes it is my phone, sometimes it's my notebook. Can I easily sync my email?  Not really, Contacts... Harder... Calendar, next to impossible. In a semi-connected, mobile world mixed with different OSes, Consumer Electronics and PCs we have a lot to think about before we sit down and start hacking a program together for even the simplest tasks these days.

This was originally a post written on my iPhone in reply to thoughts about developing for things like Microsoft Sync in a language not supported because apparently Microsoft and Ford don’t think anyone is capable of writing apps for it.  I thought the idea deserved to be expanded just a little and blogged for more visibility because it is a driving force in what my company, Digital Dreamshop does.  We try to make interfaces for everyone, not just people who are used to using computers or can tweak settings here and there to make the software “work for them”.

More and more we are finding that people using our software know less and less about how a computer works and strive to accommodate that.  They are using our software to accomplish a task, if it’s overwhelming, “your software sucks”.  If you get in the users way, they hate your app.  I recommend reading http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/ as well as David Platt’s book if you are not a developer.  Another good read is http://www.sensible.com/ even though the site truly sucks in appearance :-)  I recommend these for the general ideas they represent, not necessarily their solutions.

We will never live in a one philosophy world, especially when it comes to software, OSes and Interfaces, get over it and figure out how to make it easier to get things in and out of your application and how to treat the User as the one controlling the reason you have a job.

If your boss is telling you that their way is the only way and the users don’t know, quit and get a job with someone who gives a damn about User Experience. Old mentalities of forcing methodologies on users and putting them in a box is going to die fast. 

Our Applications need to talk to the outside world, both in terms of the Interface and the Data.  One thing is for sure, the number of devices, programs, and the data they contain will only grow with time.  How will your Applications interact in that world?  Do you even have a plan?