Since the first Xerox GUI all User Experience has been locked to the ‘Desktop’ metaphor, is time for a change. But what can be the next metaphor?
Lately
With the advent of mobile communications, the first intents were to squish the same old metaphor into mobile devices, resulting in the unusable User Experience we have in mobile devices today. Lately are starting to appear some initiatives with better User Experience like the iPhone, but there is still a lot of room to make things better.
The desktop in the other hand is petrified in the same old metaphor with almost no signals of changes in these 30 years. The current Desktop GUIs, like Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome among others are still not able to move in other direction.
The companies are starting to realize the importance of having a great User Experience for their services and products and taking steps in the right direction… but is too little to late. Is a fact that the best User Experience win; and the ones with a poor one will perish, more in these hard times when consumers will take a second (and sometimes a third) look before pull out their wallets.
People or Developers
What is holding the change? Well, this is a vicious circle where Users don’t like disruptive changes and the Developers knowing that (and willing to sell their products) don’t make any significative innovation on the User Experience and User Interface.
Also the current OSs are designed in concordance with the old metaphor, making more difficult to make any change at all. With a new metaphor is also needed a new concept of Operating System to match this new metaphor.
More like we are now
The old stuff work back in the day when things where disconnected and sporadic; all that changed. Today we have real-time lives and social networks and we are able to connect to the internet almost from everywhere.
The current work flow is “Open an App to do a task” giving the application the principal role. This application centered design of the current OSs is constraining the innovation in the User Experience. The applications are “boxed” in their “windows” and frames and rarely expand outside.
The new metaphor have to reflect our current state, have to interconnected, open, manageable and powerful; to make the right impact in our lives.
We really need this new Operating System and as soon as possible.
Update: More Discussion at IxDA.
