Experiences: Future User Experiences

Welcome to the first edition of my new column: A Better Future: Designing for good in a changing world. My hope is that this column will be a natural extension of the two series I’ve previously written for UXmatters, “Understanding Gender and Racial Bias in AI” and “The State of UX Design Education.” My goal is to continue educating myself and this community on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the future of design, with a focus on the perils of designing in an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered world and what we, as UX designers and researchers, can do to address these challenges.

To get us all on the same page about capital G, good design, I’m kicking off my column with a discussion about design ethics. This topic feels particularly relevant given the recent news from Menlo Park, California. As I write this, The Wall Street Journal has released The Facebook Files, investigative research that concludes what many of us have suspected for years: Facebook has some special rules for elite users. Instagram is toxic for teenage girls. Facebook is an angry place and makes the world an angrier place. Read More

Personal computing is in an awkward adolescence right now. On one hand, we are rapidly moving into ubiquitous computing environments that let people constantly interact with the omnipresent network; on the other, the devices and interfaces we are using to enter these new frontiers provide woefully inadequate user experiences. Let’s take a look at one of the key technologies that will take mobile user experiences to the next level: holography.

Holography and the State of Input

The primary reason why the BlackBerry® became such an enormous success is its miniature QWERTY keyboard, which lets people rapidly enter information and, in the process, made easy-email-while-on-the-run a reality. Earlier devices such as cell phones and Palm® PDAs provided a substandard means of communicating with a computing system, but the BlackBerry took the well-established and long-practiced QWERTY keyboard interface and employed it in a practical and portable form. This allowed people to engage in a more natural human/computer interaction. Read More