No-UI: How to Build Transparent Interaction

In this article for the Interaction Design Foundation, I explore the concept of Non-visual User Interaction and what it means for designers of digital products and services.

"No-UI is pioneered by the ground-breaking work of researchers who have realized that, in today’s world, we are surrounded by computers and applications that constantly require our attention: smartphones, tablets, laptops and smart-TVs competing for brief moments of our time to notify us about an event or to request our action. The bulk of these attention requests and actions take place through interaction with Graphical User Interfaces, peppered with a short audio or vibration cue here and there. However, rich user experiences are not only dependent on good visual design: they can take advantage of the context awareness, sensors and multimodal output capabilities of modern computing devices. So as to take advantage of non-visual interaction options, we need to design these carefully, considering the modern advances in software and hardware sensing, paired with Artificial Intelligence (AI), which continue to transform the way we interact with our computing devices. We’re gradually moving away from designing GUIs, which require the user’s full attention, and moving towards designing calmer, less obtrusive interaction, bringing human-computer interaction without graphics to the core of the User Experience: Welcome to the world of no UIs."

Click here to read the full article!