My pal Matt “Blackbelt” Jones, a user-experience wonk at Nokia, has written a guest-rant on new UIs for the pervasive age over at Warren Ellis’s Die Puny Humans.
Drill the digital ground and you’ll see that the surface strata of interface has not moved as quickly as what lies beneath.
The shape has changed. We’ve moved from the discrete, fixed computing of the mainframe, mini and pc to the fluid, agile, grid.
The stuff has changed. We send emotional bits and digital pheremones as much as we send practical packets.
The scale has changed. The corpus has swollen while the skin stayed the same. We stored data the equivalent of 37,000 times the library of congress on our hard drives in 2002, and shunted 3 times that much around the net[1].