Design chief of Google, Matias Duarte is not happy with the UI being used nowadays in smartphones. In next 10 years he wants to replace computer & phone with something different, something totally new with a continuous mesh of information around us. For that he wants to change the way we use phones right now. He wants a total change in the phone’s UI.
“I see what we’re doing now in this digital interactive space as a kind of industrial revolution,” Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, “But there’s a real risk, there’s a real risk of stagnation.”
He says the future devices & their components were made out of a ‘mesh’. “The system or the computer can become more accessible and more universal because it operates on atoms of interaction that are more human, that are conceptual, that are things that you could speak to or things that you could draw, he said that he wants computers to be more human & less disruptive to our lives “As we get more and more screens and more and more devices that are smart, both integrated into our homes but also on our bodies, it’s creating new types of problems that are going to create a new type of opportunity.”
He said a total overhaul is not a small task. Even if we look at an iPhone, they are using the same strategy of rows of icons since the very first iPhone was introduced. He talked about iPad Pro & Surface Pro4 saying they’re basically laptops “I don’t think you could really call it a significant fading of the laptop. It’s a new blouse by the same name.”
Apple’s victory was good & ‘fairly positive’ because they did something at that time. “But it also crystallized a lot of other things that were kind of staid even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well. This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”
Durate was the one who helped Google to bring Material Design which got great love from users with intuitive colors on top of it. Since then he is working with Android Wear. He added that Google always has incredible design talent.“Over the last 20 years we’ve been really making it accessible to everybody. Almost mass producing software. But, just like the first mass produced things during the industrial revolution, they were not the best designed things.”
Android & Apple both have left the icons & rows design philosophy for Android Wear & Watch OS respectively. “Why should there be a grid of apps on a watch? It’s this tiny thing and it’s hard to pick through and hard to organise and so on and so forth. And as you accrue and use more and more services that’s going to start to get really ridiculous. You’re going to have a massive grid on a little tiny screen. So that created this opportunity where we could try something new and different.”
When asked about design that are being used now. Will these designs continue to be on same platform of row & icons? Will we be stuck using the same GUI on our smartphones over next 10 years based on the original iPhone??
He replied “I hope not. I really hope not. That would make me very sad and I’m doing my hardest to make sure that that is not the case. That is one of the things that I care passionately about. I’m going to do my hardest to make sure that in 10 years time you’re not going to sitting with a single laptop and walking around with a phone. But instead working with a much richer, continuous mesh of devices and interfaces.”
We hope to see some new deign that will change the whole mobile & computing experience. the software will become more intelligent & more human in nature. If Google is thinking in right direction, we will get more modern designed smartphone UI which will be more useful than now. Right now we are using the same UI that was 10 years ago. So this needs to be changed.
This post was last modified on January 1, 2016 11:59 am