Tag: User Interface

With more and more smart devices in our homes, the need to occasionally reset or troubleshoot them comes along with that. But how do you interact with a device that has no keyboard, mouse, or other input mechanism when it can’t connect to your network?

Volvo is a car company that has built its reputation around on safety for the most part. The company is talking a bit about its new in-car experience and that experience revolves around a big touchscreen.

Because of its size and form, Google Glass has a limited – albeit seemingly capable – user interface: touch gestures, head gestures and voice commands. Even though Glass’ display is visible at all times, there are times when it would be impractical, insensitive or downright impossible to interact with it.

The “Slide to Unlock” interface has become one of the most iconic features of iOS devices. It never occurred to me to think of it as a fun activity, but apparently thousands of people do, because there’s actually a game built around it.

I’m a sucker for lists and GTD software, and RealMac Software’s Clear for iPhone looks pretty sweet. Its stupid-simple way of displaying tasks and manipulating them makes it a good option for people who want to keep track of tasks and get them done in a snap.

I think it’s kind of sad how a lot of people are becoming increasingly attached to their gadgets like smartphones and tablets. I mean, finding them to be useful is one thing. But feeling like you can’t last a day without them?

We’ve featured several entries from this year’s Fujitsu Design Award competition organized by designboom, but all of them focused on modularizing a computer or making it more portable. It’s not a surprising focus, what with the growing popularity of portable computing.

Scrolling is one of the most frequent actions made in interacting with touchscreen devices. For me it’s such a basic action that I actually didn’t think too much of it, until I saw this new control interface developed by a research team at Osaka University.

It’s not only iOS devices that have a good grasp of touchscreen UIs, Microsoft isn’t bad at them either. However, there are only a few computers available that allow you to use gestures, and one of those is the Microsoft Surface.

Seriously, will the future be button-less? What’s up with this surge of motion- and gesture-based UIs? Aside from Microsoft and Sony working on motion-based gaming controllers, Hitachi is also currently working on a Minority Report-ish interface.

Pranav Mistry loves creating new ways of using and interacting with computers – he was the one who created SixthSense, a portable interface which projects interactive images, not only intuitive and practical but cool as hell to use.

In general, devices with touchscreens are intuitive, but not always convenient. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for an actual physical interface. For example, the possible motions for rotation on a touchscreen are awkward, whereas if you had a knob you could easily perform rotation.

Yuta Sugiura and his colleagues at the Graduate School of Media Design in Keio University had a valid starting point – most of the software or hardware input systems today have no direct correlation to the command to be executed, and so are not that easy to master.

Those of us who spend more time in front of our computers instead of other humans know that the current keyboard and mouse method of interaction with our magic boxes are far from perfect. I for one, want a half-sphere, multitouch surface that lets me move stuff onscreen with my right hand (my mouse hand) resting on it.

HP wowed crowds with this amazing, massive multi-touch display wall at this past week’s Wall Street Journal D5 Conference. The 16 x 8-foot interactive display allowed multiple visitors to simultaneously control audio, video, photos and other multimedia content using their hands to navigate.

Microsoft today announced a new startup business focused on improving user interfaces for mobile devices called “ZenZui.” ZenZui’s differentiator is its unique “zooming” user interface which lets you quickly maneuver from one application or website to another.