Last Saturday, as said before, I took part in Madrid Un-Conference 4.0 and I would love to share with you my presentation a thoughts about the creation of form in software engineering. The main purpose of this micro-speak (but an impressive and huge topic) was to start a conversation about innovation in user interface and the now widespread use of control libraries, control toolboxes and pre-fabricated experiences.
Nature is an imperfect environment that adapts itself through form to compensate its own defects. The design of each of the forms is created with high precision and adapted to a concrete purpose, so everything is exactly created for its intended use. Since the beginning of time, human-kind has been designing forms across different environments and adapting the for the use of human-beings. This way, we became the biggest and most active maker of forms, modifiers of elements with our own set of tools, with our own mindset.
Not so long ago, we started to live the precise form definition momentum, a constant improvement on the design processes to achieve better experiences in each of our creations. Through this insights we molded the concept so called user experience, but sometimes I find somehow hard and confuse to appreciate the differences between terms like usability and user experience.
To me, usability seems to concentrate on molding and adapting previously created forms to make them understandable by the widest amount of users, while user experience , in the other hand, observes and examine the natural gestures and ways in users to create a perfect adaptation to the actual and real needs. The problem I see is that the process of molding, adapting or analyzing form has become so technical that the single act of examination requires complete comprehension of terms like controls, radio buttons, check boxes, lists, grids and drop downs, and completely loosing its intuitiveness.
The creation of subsets of tools to ease the process of creating forms obeys us to remove innovation when driving our creation process through the use of control toolboxes with pre-created patterns, but the process is also so technologically influenced that engineers try to express their highest value and knowledge by using the latest (although sometimes useless) technology. In fact, the visions exposed by designers and developers provide a different and workable perception of the form, but in most of the cases neither relates to the natural form of users: completely ignored in the process of form discovery but examined on how they adapt to the form created this unnatural way.
Actually I'm starting to feel a little scared about the constant duplication of experiences or forms that doesn't provide any new feature or enhancement more than a change in technology, maker or company. For example, what's the difference between Outlook, Mac Mail, Gmail or Eudora? All of them are e-mail clients with a list of messages, a folder view and an e-mail preview. What's web or desktop providing in each case? Searchability? Indexability? I understand the small micro-interactions and micro-improvements provided in each of the cases like offline vs online storage, free space vs local space and ajaxified interfaces, but is there any point in having so many different versions of the same identical thing?
Or, using a other example, we can see how to improve design through technology in the case of MSN Messenger vs. Yahoo Messenger for Vista. Both of them include the same identical list of contacts and chatting windows but in the case of Yahoo Messenger for Vista it's based on Windows Presentation Foundation to create a better user interface through extensive use of uncalled animations.
So, what do you think? Is the process of design forms really established on the natural gestures and the form itself? do you think it would be better to create impressive new forms even when they break apart existing knowledge if they provide a more natural experience? would user appreciate this new and innovative forms?