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.
Sure, there are plenty of dialog boxes which haven’t kept up with the times, but why does that mean the entire desktop/application metaphor is broken?
The window of an application is still a great way to organize everything related to a task in one place. Some applications do this better than others, and I think iPhoto is a successful example: it handles everything related to photos in a single window and obscures any kind of file management in favor of photo-specific sorting mechanisms (date, filmrolls, faces, locations, the latter being new metaphors that didn’t exist in real-world photography) and plenty of print and share options within itself. The only time it breaks out of this is when sending photos by email, in which case it sends them over to the app specific to sending and receiving e-mail.
Not all apps are as successful at managing all aspects of a task in one place. Those text and color dialogs, along with open, save as and many other dialogs occur when the developer turns over tasks to the operating system, but that alone isn’t proof the desktop/application metaphor is broken.
@Jamison
You are right when you say: some applications do better than others.
But really think the “desktop/application” metaphor is broken, cause when doing stuff, you have to break your flow and change it very often, not all applications have the same work-flow and that’s is a little frustrating, at least for some people.
The screenshots are only to make a “visual” point.