Intelligent boxes

A few years back, whilst doing some consulting for Orange I came across widgets. Looking at the evolution of interface architectures i put together this short train of thought.

A book of hours. A revolutionary layout where information flourished in boxes which surfaced from wallpaper backgrounds.

I’ve always loved the way cartoons organized a narrative into boxes. Little windows that have their own temporal timeline, perpendicular to the main timeline.

BBC had layout boxes, and eventually those boxes became more dynamic.

Eventually those boxes became a little more dynamic…

Remember the children’s encyclopaedias that showed us the mechanics of the world? Every little chamber with its own purpose.

Moving on to interfaces. Windows seven and the way they approach boxes in a cinematographic manner. There’s always more outside of the frame and the user is made aware of it through navigation clues. It’s an interesting strategy, used by apple, microsoft and everyone else out there, but it does not scale very well. Imagine you are allowed to view the house above one compartment at the time. It perpetuates a grid/directory like layout, simply allowing users to browse it using one or more axis.

I then remembered widsets, which later became Nokia Ovi. At the time they were very inspiring.

I remembered them because they took the boxed house and said: the house has electricity and pipes and antennas and all those compartments are connected to various sources of content. Those compartments are changing because they are connected. I loved William J. Mitchell and the way he looked at both city and internet from an infrastructural perspective.

Once connected, those little boxes became trendy and practical and alive.

The iphone inherited some of this intelligence, but mostly it’s just a grid layout of buttons that open applications. Very little surfaces from the application itself.

If that were the case it would become very messy and processor intensive and ultimately Apple are about extreme simplicity…

New interfaces will only become really interesting when these mostly static button grids start surfacing some of the information that they entail.

A grid is a simple way to organize information. We tend to remember where things are and memorize their position. If these buttons would be constantly moving they would lose familiarity, rendering the user experience more difficult. This obvious conclusion is hindering the way interfaces may move forward.

The interface lies between us and ‘reality’. We use it as a tool and in doing so it shapes us. There are daft tools and intelligent tools. Intelligent interfaces are intelligent tools that push us and make us more intelligent beings. This first layer between us and the tool needs to go beyond the old argument of “It needs to be so easy even my granny can use it”. That is a market requirement not a human one. Granny will learn.

Yes, you can do a lot with a hammer. Yes, it’s the application that the simple button calls that needs to entail intelligent potential, still… I die a little every time I look at that screen and think of this logic where so little intelligence surfaces.