24. UX applied, a matter of choice_
(this story is part of an ongoing series introducing automotive interiors as an evolution of our habitat)
Car interiors are dictated evermore by graphic interfaces. UX development is about enabling choices. A ‘hello’ in Helvetica is not the same if written in Bodoni, while in Times New Roman, it can be as unremarkable as absent. From Vogue’s well balanced, strong, solid and vertical type to New York subway’s versatile fond, a coating of ‘written’ emotions crusts our surroundings. While ‘mad men’ (Madison Avenue NY), where possessed by selling image, they merged semantics of written language, art and motion picture, unbeknownst to them, and shifted communication into a new type. From ‘Cowboy’ letters to glossy ‘candy’ and heavy metal gothic fonds, typography became storytelling. An instant message that can cut through city noise and reach our emotions, a short of multi-sensory emotional explosion. From our homes to our cars, we ‘consumed’ typeface way before kilobytes. This living type of graphic feedback is a product industrially designed to be seen, read and convey meaning. Geometric patterns are universal, more than languages, like a superpower of communication.
The 1984 Olympic Games was the first time ever, a machine interface was publicly tested. The push-button telephone was conceived and implemented to reach diverse populations from around the world. The successful attempt consisted on putting together, under one applied idea, all participating cultures and languages. That was the beginning of somewhat a common dialect addressed through specific tasks (1984 Olympic message system: a test of behavioral principles of system design).
From then to today’s UX, a new challenge emerged: the most important advancement in restoring social intimacy is referring to the emotional aspect of communication such as intonation, facial expression or body language that a text can hardly represent. In addition, with the tremendous ability of smartphones to transmit images, images lost their power. In an attempt to fill this gap, Emojis became the fastest growing language ever. Our brains create a new processing pattern ‘listening’ on what lays beyond language. Enhanced working memory is a derivate of the capacity to visualize and handle graphic symbols. In the physical world, there is an aspect of randomness that serves the experience. In the digital world instead, every single aspect of the delivery is designed and coded, condensed into a single screen interface, making digital products more standard than physical ones. The challenge however lays further down the road.
The experience we create digitally defines the type of data that we are going to collect. Any data we collect, codes the following generation of products. The temptation is obvious: doing more (of the same) leading into infinite updates. It establishes a kind of joint-dot-globalness, a fragmentation of a narrative and then, the need of a novel object to put together a new one narrative. What if we were to use this information in order to give control to the ‘users’ over their own data. Rather than obstructing us from human behavior, it is about overcoming the choice overload, enabling each one of us to foster decisions in shorter time frames for better choices. Visual data, embedded in our products, is the most efficient language to enable choice. The outcome can dissolve or strengthen any physical product. We are entering a new era, a new type of literacy with multifaceted challenges.
Dyslexia does not occur to society without alphabet. Equally, UX does not come without a price. From balloon-race graphic diagrams to pie-charts and mosaics, skyscrapers, mountains and valleys, information has a magnetic quality and addiction. There is definitely something unthreatening about the beauty of data on important matters in the sense that it is better to participate to its interpretation instead of just being told. Digital interface graphics become the universal connection from our car to our house and to any place through a screen. Car Interiors are far more data intense than smartphones and Web versus Software is like distribution before benefit, thus accessing user experience before use. We cannot be implementing this immense digital superpower just to regenerate proven models, instead it is time to prioritize the human aspect.
_to be continued…
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