Contextual
Human intelligence entirely depends on multi-modality and rich context. We are situational, intuitive, and highly contextual.
A movement of eyebrow may convey a deep insight in the context. We follow facial cues, hand gestures, and emotional coloring of speech. Most of us do not experience all of these consciously, but feel through it.
For neurodiverse of us, it is a fascinating lifelong study of humans.
The bandwidth between humans is high because we encode knowledge in multiple modalities at once and are capable of expression with our whole body.
When it comes to personal computers, we need the same level of contextual expressiveness and understanding. We need a computer to grasp where we are, what we are doing, who we are with, what task we are working on, what goal we are pursuing, our emotional state, where we are looking, and how. Like a good friend would do.
All of this comes together as Natural UI. An interface and way of interacting that is natural to humans and thus inevitable for truly personal computers.
And what is natural for personal computers will shape how we do everything, including work. Today, we are constrained to mostly typing and pointing.
In the last 15 years, touch and multi-touch took over our most personal computers. There were many skeptics when the iPhone was released. But the form factor won because it tapped into more natural ways of interacting. Direct touch is a lot more intuitive than a mouse or stylus.
This decade, we will see voice taking over as a natural entry point. We will be talking and texting instead of checking websites or navigating apps. This will reshape all the layers of natural UI. It will change personal computing. Most of everything will become a continuous conversation.
My favorite feeling in the world is to come to a restaurant, say “as usual, please”, and get exactly what I want the way I prefer it. The reason why it works is because the staff remembers me, remembers what I prefer, and is ready to continue our “conversation”.
Our personal computing will be a collection of conversations with humans and agents. The most complicated knowledge tasks will be structured as multiple conversations in a multi-modal environment.
We will be talking to dashboards, diving deep into financial data. Talking to scientific papers to verify our assumptions. Talking to food delivery services. Switching between text with rich media and voice without loosing the context.
The very structure of operation system will change to accommodate easier transitions and blending of conversations.
This is very exciting time for user experience design.
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