AI Bring Back Analog Interfaces
How current AI technology could bring back physical analog interfaces
Let us talk about how AI can radically transform user interface design. Specifically, I want to talk about how AI can bring back physical analog interfaces with buttons, dials, and sliders.
One of my visions is an AI-powered smartphone called the Raven AI, which does not have a display at all. That means bucking an entrenched trend, since 2007 when the first iPhone got released.
What, are you crazy? Why would you want to make a phone without a display? And you want to bring back old physical buttons and dials, you say? So you want something looking like an old Nokia 3310 dumb phone seen below?
No, that is absolute not my vision. AI allows us to entirely rethink how we create a physical, analog interface. Before I get into the details of how to do that, I want you to rethink everything you think you know about user interface design.
How do you create a high quality, timeless design? The Nokia 3310 today comes across as cheap and unsophisticated. Much the same way as digital watch from the 1980s. Yet people have much older mechanical watches today which are highly attractive and considered status. What makes something durable, and what turns it into a fad?
While I am much like economist Thorstein Veblen, critical of ostentatious consumption and luxury, there are still interesting insights about design we can draw from luxury brands. Why do so many products look complicated? A remote control has typically had a zillion buttons. Since most people cannot handle such complexity, what exactly drives the creation of such products?
Studies have found that when a product has few buttons and look very simple to use, people tend to assume those products are unsophisticated, lack advance features and are "cheap." Thus people end up buying products which are too complex for them out of fear of getting a cheap, low-quality product.
How can product designers get around that bias? By signaling sophisticating and quality in other ways than complexity. Apple does it through the use of expensive materials and finishes. Rather than being made of plastic, their laptops are carved out of a single piece of aluminum in an elegant design unlike their cheap creaky plastic competition among PCs.
Bang & Olufsen has done much the same for TVs, stereos and other electronics. They use iconic, elegant design to signal sophistication while having an actual simple interface.
Even when Apple made their computers out of plastic, their designs stood out. Below is an image of the Mac G4 Cube, the very first Mac I owned. It was released 24 years ago, July 19, 2000.
At the time, PCs were ugly, noisy beige boxes. The G4 Cube has a smooth transparent outer finish of quality plastic. Yes, I know the word "quality" and plastic sound odd together, but it really was. The thing belonged in a museum. It was a work of art.
But Apple products are not really made to last a long time. They aren't collector items like expensive watches. But there are car brands such as Bugatti which make cars in small series. These cars are actually hand made. They are collectors items and thus meant to be owned for a long time.
Bugatti could install the latest in touch screen interfaces in their cars, but the problem is that whatever fancy electronics they put in will become as dated as a 1980s digital watch within a few years. That does not work when a car is supposed to be owned or traded for decades. Thus, if you look at the design of the Bugatti Chiron, it is made with analog physical interface rather than digital touch displays.
Designers have to make something that looks good, modern and timeless all at the same time. Music instruments are another interesting category of products that are timeless and greatly appreciated and coveted. This even applies when instruments are what we might call "modern" such as electrical guitars. The Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, which is still widely used and popular, was first released in 1954. The design and function is basically unchanged since then. In other words, there is a timeless physical interface between the player and the instrument which has not changed in 70 years.
It is not merely the physical interaction between you and your fingers which has not changed but also the electrical interface. You don't plug USB cables to a modern electrical guitar, but a 1⁄4 inch (6.35 mm) audio jack (also called a phone connector). This connector has history back to 1877, and we still use it today on musical instruments. Imagine if people had put digital interface on an electrical guitar starting in the 1990s? Those guitars would look silly and outdated today.
The Importance of Tactile Feedback
Imagine an electrical guitar where you replace the strings with a touch screen? How would that work? There are apps for that today, but most people don't play music that way. Why is that?
With physical strings, you can feel your fingers on the strings. You can feel what coord you are playing. You can directly manipulate the string to produce other effects, such as by pushing it down or pulling the strings in a different way.
The same applies to driving. Imagine replacing your pedals and steering wheel with a touch display. How would that work? Not very well. Being able to feel the steering wheel in your hand is a great advantage.
And this does not apply to just the steering wheel but every function in a car. Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare, performed a study to compare the performance of physical vs. touch - based digital interface.
The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.
You don't need to look to perform many tasks when they are a physical button or dial you can feel with your hand while keep focus on the road.
I could go on about my own experience. I used to have a cooking stove with a touch based interface. It was horrible to use. When I got my current stove I deliberately picked a stove with analog dials for setting temperature. Every so often the boring old way works better.
If Analog Interface are Great, Why Did They Go Out of Fashion?
Everything I have written thus far might sound like a propaganda piece for physical interfaces, but there must be a catch? Why otherwise did digital touch-based interface completely take over?
The problem for physical analog interface crops up when the interface gets complex. We have all encountered interfaces that "feel" a bit too much like the AI-generated image I made below.
Why does the touch interface win when complexity grows? Touch-based interfaces, like any interactive interface that is well-designed use a user interface design principle called Progressive Disclosure. It is works like this:
Initially, show users only a few of the most important options.
Offer a larger set of specialized options upon request. Disclose these secondary features only if a user asks for them, meaning that most users can proceed with their tasks without worrying about this added complexity.
Physical interface do not offer this opportunity. They cannot hide less used functionality and then reveal than functionality once it is needed. Instead, it shows all functionality to you at the same time.
Some interfaces try to reduce the number of buttons by creating complex modes. That means, what the buttons mean and do change depending on the mode you are in. But with small unintuitive interfaces with blinking LEDs or small black and white LCDs you cannot easily figure out what is going on. My current microwave oven is just like that, and I hate it. Instead of a dial for power and a dial for the timer it uses buttons which change meaning depending on the mode.
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