Here, Now & The Future of Interaction Design
Introduction
Interaction Design has had huge development over the past couple of decades with the rise of technology and the technological advances that we’ve made with devices over the past few years. Initially interaction design was placing a heavy focus on designing for the web when computers were first brought into production for the vast majority of people, with the invention of smart phones and handheld tablet devices interaction design has now placed more focus on these smaller devices as more and more people are starting to use them on a daily basis in comparison to PC’s and computers. With devices getting smaller and smaller but still retaining their power and capabilities on what they can do interaction designers now have to consider all of these aspects when it comes to designing user interfaces for the products.
Importance of Fluid Design
It is extremely important to create websites and digital products that can translate across varying screen resolutions, having fluid design allows the product to be displayed correctly across every screen size imaginable. As some people may have the latest smartphone which may have a larger screen resolution than the previous model, having the product scale with the devices screen resolution allows the interface to be displayed how it should be displayed regardless of the size of the screen the user is viewing the website on. Even with devices getting smaller by the year, especially with the invention of wearable tech like smart watches, having all these products translate across every devices can become an extremely difficult and tedious task for designers.
Removing The Screen
Devices are slowly starting to remove the screen and beginning to place an emphasis on different ways for users to interact with the devices, a good example of this can be seen in Alexa by Amazon and Google Home which allow the users to interact with the device through their voice as opposed to using touch or controlling/navigating the product through a mouse and keyboard like a computer. Personally I find this extremely fascinating and interesting to see where this could lead us in the future of interaction design, I know there is developments of certain wearable tech that aims to make tech a part of our human body with devices such as smart glasses which allow us to see the world in a different way either through augmented reality or with the assistance of artificial intelligence – this is both exciting and scary at the same time.
While using artificial intelligence may be good for humanity on the sense of productivity it could also be extremely destructive to what humanity have built over the past century, with robots and artificial intelligence being developed it could put a lot of people out of work due to the position being filled by robots and computers as they are able to do the same job in a more productive fashion. Personally I think these developments in technology could be extremely beneficial to humanity and the future of the planet but in my opinion I think we need to set ourselves limitations before we shoot ourselves in the foot, its all well and good inventing these products and new technologies to assist us in reaching our goals but it needs to have some sort of limitation so we don’t over-run ourselves and allow the technology to become more advanced than humanity, by this I mean in the sense of allowing technology to reproduce and create different technology or allow it to have a mind of its own.
Typography
Typography will always have a place in the future of technology, more some of devices that have screens as opposed to devices that use voice recognition as a form of interaction. We are starting to see typography become a lot bigger and bolder in terms of display on smaller screen resolutions, without typography our interfaces would just be plain colour and basic shapes without any meaningful content to make it easier for the user to navigate, a good example of how typography is being reduced to display the content that is important to the user is on smart watches like the Apple Watch, as the screen size of these smart watches are extremely small in comparison to other devices like tablets, smartphones and even computers the content has to be diluted to allow for a better user experience.