No to "No UI"
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There's an entire body of research on visual design (a great introduction to which is Colin Ware's "Information Visualization") that gets right down to the nitty gritty details of human perception, like eye tracking speed, visual channel capacity, move and scan loops, visual working memory, the relationship between luminance channels, motion and shape as opposed to color channels, and on and on and on.
It turns out that "good" design principles can be quantified, communicated, taught, and learned, are based on our common biology, and that they needn't come at the expense of aesthetics or sound reasoning.
The "invisible interface" people's goal (in strong form) is to dispense with explicit interfaces as much as possible, seeing them as just friction between what people want and what the computer can do. One version of how to achieve that vision is AI-heavy, relying on people saying what they want in natural language and software like Siri figuring out how to give it to them.
The rough opposite is more of an interface-centric approach, where the goal is to actually foreground the interface as an explicit point of interaction, and have it present a logical and coherent set of controls that, rather than being invisible, makes clear "I am an interface and I do X/Y/Z".
Detailed information about things such as eye tracking speed seems to me like it'd be most useful in doing the actual implementation, once you have a rough idea of its purpose and use case. It's certainly possible to do scientific investigation of the more general question as well, but it requires more than micro-scale laboratory tests.
This is a very important distinction most test-only UX designers miss.
For example: If you test a skeuomorphic design versus a flat design, the testing will only tell you which of these interpretations of each design philosophy works best. However, maybe a better, more inspired, skeuomorphic design would possible perform better than flat if given a a different interpretation.
tl;dr -- testing only shows you which implementation works better in a set, not the best implementation possible.
I.e. a lot of people UX people test was tested in pseudo environments.
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you...
Many UX experts laughed when this was written in 2010. But it is now the default IMO.
Testing has to be done in its actual environment to provide really useful feedback or be something completely (like a new way of interacting with your computer) new in order to be tested outside its final environment.
Testing no-ui is even harder since you have to build a "persona" before you can test the results.
It seems silly to us tech-minded folk, but my parents truly did not understand what role they had in correcting for the GPS's mistakes.
It never occurred to them that it was possible to edit the route selection, or just go off-course and wait for the route to recalculate. As the poor map data[2] led them on roundabout routes veering across the state, their response to my pleading that they pre-select the best route (which they already knew about) was simply "let's see where she's taking us."
Through constant reinforcement via the media, the abstract 'cloud' paradigm has been deceitfully expanded to represent any new technology.[3] The disembodied voice of the GPS,[4] to them, is an authority rather than simply a tool.
UX problems are going to become much more complicated through all of this. We've got to figure out whether our goal is to sell people products or help people to enhance their lives with technology. To do the latter, software needs to be helpfully aware of the possibility of failure. That's what honest, understandable design means to me.
[1]: If your designers are too terrible to make a visually distinctive on/off button state, *you need to use sliders*.
[2]: (and/or impossible-to-determine avoid highways/tolls setting)
[3]: "How does it get maps?" they asked me, a process which, were I not present, they would have simply taken for granted along with the million other points of abstraction necessary for a piece of tech like in-car GPS.
[4]: (which they can only refer to as "her" or "she" rather than "it")To her, the answering machine's voice is an instruction of what type of input the machine needs.
To us, of course, the answering machine's voice is just a product of the sad state of answering machine voice technology.
The point is that the actual interaction becomes invisible. I.e. not as much manual input but rather the input is based your everyday actions.
You take the train as you usually do. The system knows you normally get to work at 9 but it also know the train is delayed so you get a message that its delayed.
Thats the vision of the future, thats the seamless and non-obtrusive part.
Not that it wont be visually displayed.
The nest takes away much of the manual work you had to do (adjust based on when you are home etc) it doesn't remove the feedback mechanism.
The point is, if systems that anticipate your needs do not have adequate interface for working around them - and by adequate, I mean easily discoverable and intuitive, then they will be rejected by the majority of consumers. And with good reason. Technology should serve us, not require us to adapt to them.
The UI is in itself forcing you to adapt to it by asking you to input data into it.
Your refrigerator does not require you to turn on the light when you open it. Instead it turns on when you open the door.
I see this not as a revolution but as a slow (but exponentially faster) evolution. As issues gets ironed out you can remove more and more manual labour from the system.
My point is that how comfortable people are will change over time or depending on their situation.
I might use an ipad for reading instead and thus for me and million of other people that problem is not really there and you have a market.
The only way I can understand your comment is if you don't believe systems can become better over time.
I do.
But the real problem is that turning the lights on and off normally takes too much effort (for a #firstworldproblem at least). You have to walk over and flip a switch, interrupting whatever you doing.
A better solution would be design a system that lets people control the lights with minimal effort - a gesture, or a clap, or a voice command. So you can turn on the lights only when dark and not during the day, or when you want to read in bed, etc.
The study linked to in the sentence points out that folk theories, while “not completely accurate accounts...can provide people with explanatory power, can guide behavior surrounding use of the technology, and can allow people to make predictions about how a technology will function under certain conditions.” [1]
These heuristics, though not perfectly accurate, can work for most of the user's use cases. Intervention is called for only when the practical implications of the folk theory are misleading.
[1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/l/ledantec/files/poole-ledant...
For example, a former employer of mine had problems reported with an internal search facility used by a branch of the customer service team. A coworker and I shadowed members of this team (ala contextual interview) to learn about their work and workflow. We were very interested to find that each user of this system had formed their own folk theory about the idiosyncrasies of the (very difficult to use) existing software, theories which let them get their jobs done. These theories had little to do with the inner workings of the software machine and everything to do with the tasks to be accomplished.
As such, creation of folk theory happens automatically in virtually any environment where humans use tools and processes. Even when this theory is backed by "science" or "inside knowledge", what emerges is still the working practice, mental models, and language forms of a folk theory. Back to the article's point then: the idea of invisible interface is problematic because it denies the formation and elevation of culture (folk theory) that will naturally form around an interface.
This need for intelligibility of the inner workings of the
technology, rather than simply keeping it invisible,
echoes Chalmers et al.’s work on “seamful design” [4]
Trying to define good design is like trying to define good literature. Are you trying to convince the user, force the user, agitate the user, guilt trip the user, motivate the user, educate/train the user, de-educate/un-train the user, empower the user, de-empower the user, force the user to conform, force the user to rebel... its all going to be different both for lit and for design work.
All I know is that I tend to do what ever works best for a given situation.... I think.
The argument for interface culture seems really misguided though. Since when should a culture around a poor design implementation require that we don't try and improve it's design? I'd argue that we already have said, "the best TV is no TV". Flat screen TVs are exactly this, we're moving away from the huge clunky things we used to have. I'm sure some were disappointed when their TVs lost their knobs and dials, they were part of the culture, but now no one thinks twice about it.
I don't think reducing a UI inherently means making the mental model harder to understand.
Personally I think the "Best Interface = No Interface" mantra is too black and white and totally ignores all the shades of grey in between. If you come up with these principles, the language needs to be much clearer.
I think what people meant to say was "Sometimes the best UI is no GUI".
Best response so far is by Scott Berkun[2]
[1] http://www.cooper.com/journal/2012/08/the-best-interface-is-...
[2] http://scottberkun.com/2013/the-no-ui-debate-is-rubbish/
The best literature analogy I can make is something like the ideal love story is probably a lot more like a 200 page romance novel than like a 2 minute pr0n video.
The example of architecture is a good one.
Of course, there is something to be said for the medium as art. That is, form for its own sake.
Function-only is also short-sighted, as it demeans the environment.
However, I would argue that the best architecture is hyper-rational, derived from raw need, and designed with a skill of an artisan. The real art is fulfilling the need and looking good doing it.
http://ccdc11.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/durrell-bishops-marbl...
Not because it is a better UI, but just because it seems so cool.