“Visual culture” of software
I’m toying with the idea of “visual culture” of software. We have established basic affordances in software (the desktop metaphor) that haven’t changed vastly since the Graphic User Interface (GUI) was invented at Xerox PARC. Putting files into folders is something everybody understands: it’s intuitive and uses a metaphor we are all familiar with. The trend, or the noble aim, is to make software even more human, and that will be next achieved through multi-touch technology. Physically interacting with software is about as intuitive as we can get without making computers part of our brains. Multi-touch removes the barrier of using a pointing device to manipulate software.
If there is a visual culture of software, it is weird, meta, flexible, and subjective because of our power to control it, and because of the nature of how we’re viewing it. Nothing is really objective. (Sidenote: one could argue that nothing is objective anyway, as we’re using devices to view software through the frame of our own devices, our bodies, in a challenging mise en abyme of faulty hardware.)
With content aggregation, visual culture is superfluous. For example I read most blogs in my reader, where the content is taken out of visual context of the website it was originally published in. In print, content is inseparable from form. Tear up the paper pages of a book and you lose the content too, but even if you mis-link a stylesheet to an XHTML document you can still, hopefully, view the content.
The computer is just another layer of experience. Devices render websites or a programs in different ways, though designers strive to make the experience the same across devices. Another example of viewing flexibility: most software allows users to customize the placement of the elements (e.g. browser icons) if not the whole look and feel of the thing (i.e. skins, and alternative website stylesheets).
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Other metaphors that spring to mind for UIs:
- mobile (surprising eh) which isn’t normally file-and-folder based.
- games and HUDs - there seems to be a culture in FPSs, but I’d say we also had a standard “language” for these which could date back to Space Invaders
- physical/gestural (as opposed to touch-screen)
- the web, which definitely has its own culture distinct from the desktop, has happily lived without the latters shoehorned metaphors, and one that’s evolved obviously in the last 15 years
As for future of interfaces: something haptic, reaction is the elephant in the room^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htodays touch interfaces. Squeeze that desktop to find out how full it is, wander across a screenful of files with your fingertips to find the most recently used (and therefore warmest one), endure a mild electric shock if you really *do* want help from Clippy.
Not sure I see multi-touch (as opposed to other forms of touch) as being intrinsically amazing - though it’s one instantiation to date is certainly lovely.
The separability of content and form makes me wonder about Burroughs’ cut-up experiments where the form remakes the content in new ways…
And “designers strive to make the experience the same across devices”… do they? Should they? I’m not sure I’d want that. Should Hotmail be the same on my N95 as on my black-and-white WAP phone? The same there as on the web? Different bearers seem to demand different experiences IMHO.
I’m not sure what the word would be to describe an overarching level of consistency which might connect the same product across different devices. Something akin to “brand”, or less dry than “thematic consistency” (the one-web term for this kinda thang).
“And “designers strive to make the experience the same across devices”… do they? Should they? I’m not sure I’d want that. Should Hotmail be the same on my N95 as on my black-and-white WAP phone? The same there as on the web? Different bearers seem to demand different experiences IMHO.”
Agree with this: I meant, though, designers strive to make a websites consistent across operating systems and screen sizes, individual to the needs of the device they’re viewing it on. I agree that content viewed on a screen far smaller than the desktop computer should have a different experience.
“As for future of interfaces: something haptic, reaction is the elephant in the room^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htodays touch interfaces. Squeeze that desktop to find out how full it is, wander across a screenful of files with your fingertips to find the most recently used (and therefore warmest one), endure a mild electric shock if you really *do* want help from Clippy.”
Looking forward to this!
Not sure whether the HUD-style scoring etc. in Space Invaders (1978) was influenced by the 60s and 70s developments of (military) aircraft HUDs. The standardisation there of iconography and symbology certainly predates most of computer gaming and indeed PARC; but this isn’t particularly surprising one way or another. I wonder when this concept became sufficiently common in the public consciousness that it could be easily used to communicate aspects of narrative in films and on TV (it’s quite common to use HUDs for jokes in sci-fi, with the earliest example I can think of being on The Mary Whitehouse Experience).
On a separate point, I’d challenge the idea that folders are a natural organisational metaphor. Ignoring the idea of hierarchy (which I really don’t think can claim to be intuitive), I suspect that most people actually struggle with this; how often do you see people naturally filing objects consistently at home? Similarly, most people I know just shove all computer files in the same folder. I’d love to see some research on this one way or the other…
@Tom: I use the term ‘coherence’ to describe the phenomenon in your last paragraph. Allows for a little more wriggle room than the overly-strict ‘consistency’.