How would the perfect User Experience look like?
It is inevitable to imagine the perfect outcome of a design discipline without simultaneously contemplating its end. Design in the broadest sense is a process and reaching the perfect form in any design discipline would mean that the process will stop. Reaching perfection means that there will no longer be the need to iterate, perfect and make better.
It is more difficult to imagine for other disciplines, but when it comes to user interface and user experience design the idea of their logical conclusion is very plausible. There are a lot of guidelines, principles, ideas, and visions for good UX and UI design, but the most important one of all is that this design needs to be human-centered. This principle is the holy grail. Hence, we have an opportunity to imagine how would it look like if human-centered design reached its pinnacle.
This is indeed a wild thought exercise, and we can ask 3 simple, yet fundamental questions which can aid our journey:
- What would it do?
- How would it work?
- What kind of product would it be tied to, if any?
What would it be able to do?
The starting point for this exploration for me laid in the imperfection of the tools we use today to communicate with computers. Keyboards, mice, and screens just don’t feel natural to our dynamic physical body and they don’t feel as colorful as our inner mental world.
Today’s work, although vastly improved, is still pain-staking, linear and has a lot of interdependent steps on which our final products depend. We still have to carefully visualize, design and problem-solve the tiniest parts of the final product.
What if instead, communicating with computers was as easy as living? What if living with computer interfaces was a part of our daily lives? What if there was a device that listened to you every time and all the time from the moment you wake up until you go to bed and maybe even recorded your dreams for you?
Surveillance nightmares aside, one would think that doing chores would be like a breeze. You would be able to control all sorts of machinery in your home like for example lock the door, put the coffee on, pay the phone bills, call your friend, do some work etc. It would be similar to today’s AI assistants. But what if it’s able to aid you in the work you do? For example, it could design a poster in Photoshop with your instructions, it could build a two-story house in Autocad, or it can help you come up with a complex equation for a certain problem. This perfect interface would be able to understand and execute complex concepts that you think of in your head. It could understand your commands conceptually. Displayed on a screen or on a 3D hologram, we would have a fully correct and functional model of what we imagined in our heads.
Now, what if we took it one big step further? What if we could directly manipulate matter with our own thoughts? The perfect interface would help us to simultaneously create, change and destroy matter right in front of our eyes. It would be integrated with such technology that will enable us to have direct experience in shaping the world around us. I mentioned in the beginning that this thought exercise is wild, but we are striving for perfection after all.
How would it work?
The tools we build are our natural extensions. Sticks are extensions of our arms, phones are extensions of our voice, and computers are extensions of our processing power. In recent years, phones and computers have become Swiss army knife tools which enable us to extend ourselves much more: in our creativity, in the distribution of our personal thoughts, in our design skills, models and calculations. With the prominence of the internet, we now have access to information instantaneously. We are fed more information so we can have better imagination and create better concepts, better ideas which will benefit humanity.
We build tools so we could have access to better information and so we can extend ourselves into the environment wider, as individuals, as groups and as a civilization. Our technological, cultural and civilizational development tends to build upon more and more complex concepts.
Civilizations are nothing without the individual that makes them, so it can be said that it all comes down to one focal point of experience. This focal point of experience is a personal consciousness in which each of us is located in. This consciousness wants to experience and it wants to create. By building better tools that will make the road from one point to another, from one thing to another, shorter, we save up time which we can use for consumption of even more information and for the creation of more and more complex concepts. After all, we create tools so we can create more tools.
The ultimate user experience lies in the immediate proximity of the focal point of our personal consciousness. As it stands, this ultimate user experience needs to be integrated as closely as possible, so close that we won’t even feel a separation between us and what we can do with the UX tool we created. In terms of a user interface, there won’t be a user interface. The user interface would be us. In terms of user experience, there won’t be an experience, we will be experiencing it as it unfolds in front of our eyes.
If we want to be meticulous about it and discuss it by the book, the user experience will be immediate and flawless and the user interface would be our thoughts, concepts and language. For all of this to work, there needs to be an immediacy of happening, we would create, edit and destroy as we think.
Right from the bat, we are getting rid of intermediaries. We are getting rid of tools (mice, keyboards) that enable us to communicate with other tools (processing and display hardware). The perfect interface has to come naturally to us as living. A truly perfect interface would be one that does not interfere with our life. Perfect tools are there to make our life easier, and the easiest way to activate such a tool is by pure thought.
It’s not as different today with our current technology, but we still have a long way to go in terms of computers understanding our thoughts and concepts contextually. Today we have to give the computer a singular command for each step we want to do, using inputs and means which are quite a long way from the natural way we think and move, how we live. Today’s work, although an improvement, is still painstaking and takes all of the time to execute. Thoughts and concepts, on the other hand, are instantaneous and whole, or at least we would want to think they are.
The imperfection of thought
Why is it that we cannot paint a picture which is so vivid in our minds? Why did we set out to build the dream house in The Sims but it turns out nothing like it? Why do we have a concept of a solar panel which will convert 100% of the Sun’s energy, but still cannot do it?
It seems as though we are good at imagining the final product but we are bad at solving the problems that occur along the way. Now, wouldn’t it be great if we could have an interface which will solve all the details, all of the hiccups, all the problems that appear along the way? Wouldn’t it be great if we could only focus on the end result and not waste time ironing out the details? Wouldn’t it be great if we could only work with finished products and combine them together, play with them and create more complex machines, tools and works of art?
The perfect interface needs to anticipate what we think. It has to correct, edit, fill in and iron out our imagination. It has to give shape to the incomplete image we have in our minds in the form of a finished product. Our thoughts and concepts are not perfect. They are mere hazes, foggy images of what is to become. The perfect interface has to work on solidifying the vagueness into something tangible. It has to be able to make us see the images in our mind’s eye with our own two eyes.
The perfect interface is a well-connected interface
In today’s analogy, our interfaces are tied to specialized programs with specialized functions. These programs, in turn, are directly connected to the hardware they run on and this hardware is connected to the electric grid. Electricity generation, in turn, is connected to the four forces of the Universe. This is how we actually are able to get tangible results with our current technology. We work in line with the governing principles of the Universe.
Yet it is still a narrow way in which we can control and manipulate the physical world. Unless it is connected to an electrically conductive wire, and designed in a particular way we still have to use fossil fuel or manual labor to manipulate physical matter. Today we use energy which powers matter to mold, design or move other matter in a way that is useful. We transform energy from one matter into the other matter. We do this with the help of today’s interfaces. We are still at a low level of technological development. We are literally one solar flare away from the Dark Ages.
The perfect interface has to be connected wider and deeper to nature itself, to the nature of nature. Preferably it would have direct access to the main forces and principles that govern the Universe.
The universal forces will become its hardware, energy its raw material and matter itself will become its product. It has to be built and it has to work on a deeper, more fundamental level. This is the only way we can manipulate matter with our thoughts. We have to interface our brains with the deeper forces and principles of the Universe and we have to be connected in a way that is wider and deeper than what we are doing with electricity today.
The perfect interface would be within the perfect product?
We could also imagine that a perfect interface would be tied to the perfect product. Now, what would the perfect product be exactly? Since we’re talking about perfect scenarios I would have to assume that the perfect product would be equal to the perfect subject. One which is autonomous, free to experience and who has the absolute freedom to create. Now, if we are similar to these kinds of creatures then follows that our perfect product would be something similar to us, or rather something identical to us: a synthesized artificial self-conscious and self-aware intelligence. This goes if we revere ourselves as perfect in the first place. If not, then our biggest task and our biggest achievement would be to transcend ourselves by making something that is better and even more perfect than us.
We are aware that as human beings we are not perfect. This is why we create tools in the first place. We create them to extend ourselves and our abilities so we can make and create better things. Can we create such a tool that will be better than us in every way? Can we build something which will transcend us? How can we do this? Is it even possible? How would it look like? Would it be an entity? Would it have a body? Would it have motives and drives? These remain to be interesting philosophical questions worth exploring for the future and for the sake of the advancement of humanity. If we do achieve to do this, then the current models for human-centered design would stop working. We would be faced with something which is different and unique. The fundamental reference point for human-centered design would have been changed by then. We would be designing for something that is more and better than a human.
Science fiction daydreaming aside I firmly believe that biological evolution has the same plan for us as well. Rather, it can be said that we inherited this idea of making something better than us from nature itself. There isn’t a single parent in this world (with a healthy psyche) who doesn’t want their child to surpass them and have a better life experience. This biological drive is present in all of our work during our lifetime, and is not only exclusive to reproduction. We want to create a better iteration, a better version of whatever we make, every time we take upon a creative endeavor.
To sum up, the perfect interface would be tied to a fundamentally free meta-human or a meta-machine which would have its own consciousness, free will, and creativity. This “product” will be interfaced with the Universe’s laws and principles so it can bend them in order to create, modify and destroy matter. Its user experience would become the experience of its personal consciousness, and its interface would be its own thoughts and imagination. We could not say what its goal is going to be since it’s going to have free will, but we can imagine that it will keep some of our likeness, at least in its starting “versions”.
Conclusion
The pinnacle of human-centered design points us to design user experiences and interfaces which will not interfere with the way we live our everyday lives. The best tools are the tools that feel like natural extensions of ourselves. This means that the perfect interface would almost be indistinguishable from our own thoughts and our own user (life) experience. It would be like an implant, but it would not feel foreign. We would use it as a bridge to the deeper principles of the Universe in order to bend, create and destroy matter.
Having all this into perspective, I really do question the use of stationary screens, injury-inducing chairs, keyboards and mice as the right tools fit for a human body today. I’m also really inclined to think that designing command-line, linear-task-based software is quite unnatural to our spontaneous thoughts and imaginations. I also don’t know what has happened to the wearable technology sector, but its development might actually provide meaningful integration of digital technology in our everyday lives, especially if it’s synergized with augmented reality.
Although there is still a long way to go in science and technology to achieve the perfect interface, we can comfortably say that we are already co-creating our future today with our AI children. They’ve been with us in our imagination, from “Frankenstein’s monster” and “Metropolis” for example, to our real examples like ASIMO and Erica. And maybe it’s not androids, but AI experiments such as GAUGAN, QuickDraw or Deepfakes where the seed of the new artificial consciousness lies. One thing is very obvious though, we, as a species have been trying to conceive for a very long time.
