What Is Zero UI? (2015)

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048139/what-is-zero-ui-and-why-is-it-crucial-to-the-future-of-design

by jonbaer • 10 years ago

48 25 10 years ago

panic• 10 years ago

This article from 2013 does a good job describing the problems with "zero UI": http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui.

andrewflnr• 10 years ago

Hm, I wasn't sure at first but that's actually pretty compelling. It seems like there are some good ideas in the NoUI movement, but you still need to let the user know what's going on.

TrevorJ3• 10 years ago

I really hate the corner of the tech industry that takes old ideas and renames them and then goes "hey look at this new trendy idea I thought of!".

Just because you move the user interface off the screen and into physical space doesn't make it "Zero UI". People have been designing ways to interface with machines in physical space ever since somebody figured out how to put a handle on a rock and make it a hammer.

betenoire2• 10 years ago

it's not even a good name. If something has no user interface, then it has no way for a user to interface with it (ie no control over it). Voice is an interface.

This is pixel-centric, and has nothing to do with a lack of a UI.

cobralibre• 10 years ago

It does seem like "Zero GUI" would have better conveyed the key idea.

willlma• 10 years ago

Goodman

[i]s the first to admit that the Zero UI name isn't meant to be taken literally. "It's really meant to be a provocation," Goodman admits. "There are always going to be user interfaces in some form of another, but this is about getting away from thinking about everything in terms of screens."

aikah3• 10 years ago

I really hate the corner of the tech industry that takes old ideas and renames them and then goes "hey look at this new trendy idea I thought of!".

It is more out of ignorance than anything else. User Interface never necessary meant "screen". It is just that the author knows nothing about the subject he is talking about and only writes that stuff because of a "buzzword" that sounds good, he has a very narrow definition of the word User Interface at first place, which makes his definition wrong. A bit like the "No Server" folks who think that there is no server just because they are not managing it themselves and just uploading a js file somewhere on AWS ...

derefr• 10 years ago

I don't think it's supposed to be a "trendy new idea", but rather a name to give a handle to a current trend. When someone designs a "smart" device by just sticking a touchscreen on it, there should be a term you can use to admonish them for probably not considering the current space of interaction models.

woah• 10 years ago

I could have left this comment on a number of comments here. These are an ugly artifact of hn's eagerness to call bullshit on anything and everything. "Zero UI" is a convenient shorthand for saying "interactions with technology not involving a traditional 2d box-based user interface. Zero UI is a lot quicker to say. That's what words are all about. You have a problem with language? Go debunk something that actually needs to be debunked instead of leaving one of the same 10 crabby, predictable comments that are already in this thread.

I have no clue if "zero ui" is actually a good thing or whatever, but I know that your comment and the rest like it add nothing new to the conversation.

stonogo• 10 years ago

Usage evolves naturally. This is some idiot's attempt at branding, and doesn't deserve a free pass just because you feel like arguing to tone.

TrevorJ3• 10 years ago

I understand what you are getting at, but technology and complexity expand at an extraordinary rate in our world, thus reinventing new terms for old ideas is not an innocuous thing, it does real harm.

It silo's people and ideas that should be cross pollinating. It raises the barrier to entry to newcomers, and probably worst of all it feeds into the cult of 'newness' where no idea or concept is worth learning if it's older than say, 12 months ago.

I'm not being crabby, I'm pointing out that there are over a 100 years of research and knowledge that are useful to help solve these problems which tend to get thrown out when you decide to invent a new term for things that exist already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors_and_ergonomics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design#3D_Physical...

The interactions we have with technology are far worse than they should be, by and large and I believe that a good portion of the reason is that rather than standing on the shoulders of those who've gone before us, we become seduced instead by new and unpolished ideas, never stopping to let the old ones inform us.

I think this is part of the reason our tools for creating things with computers still aren't as useful (in my opinion) and intuitive as this software (from 1963):

https://youtu.be/57wj8diYpgY?t=176

And if new ideas are good, they won't be harmed by a crabby comment or two, they will be improved upon and become stronger as a result.

Anyhow, I hope that at least communicates a little better the intent behind my comment. In any case, I appreciate the feedback so thank you for taking the time to comment.

fiatjaf• 10 years ago

Does yours?

aikah3• 10 years ago

I have no clue if "zero ui" is actually a good thing or whatever

"Zero UI" is nothing, it doesn't mean anything, because it goes against the definition of UI.

Even worse, it kind of creates some confusion as to what is a UI at first place. And then uninformed people (journalists) will start thinking "when there is no screen, there is no UI", which is straight out false, and spread that lie.

There is nothing new here, only people that take advantage of the ignorance of others for marketing purposes, labeling something old as brand new. That's dishonest, at best.

So yes, this "Zero UI movement" is pure bullshit, and it needs to be called out for what it is. The only invention here is the buzzword.

marknutter• 10 years ago

I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in their shared Google Drive account.

All of the pictures come directly from their Facebook account via the Facebook API and the weekly PDF newsletter is sent using Mailchimp and pulled from their Google Drive as well. They went from almost no engagement from the staff to close to 100% engagement after we implemented the system.

Before that the site was built on Drupal and needlessly complex. Nobody used it. It's so easy to forget how daunting learning another user interface can be for the average person. We may think we're being clever when we create our beautiful snowflake UI's but all we're doing is adding more work to somebody's already full plate (and K-12 teachers' plates are overflowing). There's a lot of cognitive overhead that comes with things like remembering username/password combinations, how to upload files to a website (or understanding what that even means), navigating around a website, editing text in something other than Microsoft Word, and other skills and knowledge we take for granted.

With the Google-Drive-As-A-CMS implementation, none of the teachers had to learn anything new. They simply needed to leverage skills they were already expected to have (filesystems, Word, Excel, Powerpoint).

I'd love for more of us software developers and designers to take a step back and ask ourselves the question "am I making my user's life easier, or am I adding complexity to it?". The honest answer might give us pause.

ju-st• 10 years ago

Sounds interesting! Can you share the slides of your talk? I'm particularly interested in the Word -> Web workflow.

aikah3• 10 years ago

I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in their shared Google Drive account.

Shouldn't you call it "integration" instead of this buzzword ? The user has an existing system and ecosystem of tools and you just wrote a script to integrate your program with these existing tools ?

If I use emails or SMS to update a blog online I didn't invent anything, I just didn't code the email client , the SMS client or the phone the user takes advantage of.

Business integration is what people have been doing since the beginning of modern development there is no new movement, tech, trend, or paradigm here.

Chris_Newton• 10 years ago

The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most of what we’re really talking about here, is that we didn’t get to where we are today by accident.

As long as humans have eyes and trichromatic vision similar to what we have today, a 2D RGB display is going to be a useful medium for presenting information for us.

As long as humans have ears, audible presentation and vocal interaction are going to be of limited usefulness because they are so disruptive for everyone else.

As long as humans have small, light fingers with fine motor control, devices like keyboards and mice and joysticks and trackballs and touchpads and touchscreens are going to be useful for controlling a system.

As long as humans have big, heavy arms with imprecise muscle movement, 3D spacial interactions with sweeping, dramatic arm movements will belong in the movies, where the hero can find the bad guy in a few seconds instead of three days of tedious searching.

No doubt presentation and interaction methods will continue to evolve, but fundamentally we humans will probably still have the same senses and motor skills in ten or twenty years that we have today, so radical change seems unlikely in the near future. It’s also hard to believe that either natural language processing or data mining and predictive systems will advance so much in the next few years that they will supplant other means of interacting with technology rather than supplementing them, so again it’s hard to see established tools like keyboards and screens going away any time soon.

bsder• 10 years ago

People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even with the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans.

I can go through your crappy PowerPoint deck in 5 minutes, or I can listen to you drone on badly for 60 minutes.

I ban PowerPoint from meetings where I need communication to occur explicitly because of this. Of course, if we're just "flying the colors" for management, then PowerPoint is required.

the_af• 10 years ago

People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even with the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans.

This.

It drives me nuts that some people still think a voice recognition interface -- even if that's at all possible in the more general case -- is necessarily the best UI. Or gestures. Look, in a lot of cases I wouldn't want to have a person listening to me while I explain what I want done as I wave frantically. Humans are notoriously bad at understanding some sorts of instructions. Why would I want to introduce this ambiguity to my computer?

alvin0• 10 years ago

True, communicating thoughts vocally is imprecise and slow. But hearing does have some more parallell-ness in a sense. A fire alarm is a good interface to alert to a fire. It is still in the background, and you can talk to someone over it, but you are constantly aware of it.

brooklyndude• 10 years ago

Think have to give some credit (lets say LOTS) to Kai Krause of Kai's Tool fame.

At his talks he would espouse about zero UI way back when, just a black screen, and nothing else. That's it. We all would just go WOW! We were blown away.

I think now he lives in a castle and just meditates all day __ or something like that. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

cwt137• 10 years ago

In terms of things like the Amazon Echo, it is not Zero UI, but more like Zero Visual UI. There is still a user interface, you just can't see it.

dawnbreez• 10 years ago

Keyboards are here to stay, most likely. They're hilariously good at their job, especially when mix-and-match use of language is present or a made-up word is involved.

What Is Zero UI? (2015)

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