Product Design over time

When thinking about the frontiers of User Experience, it’s easy to get wrapped up in amazing possibilities. One day the profoundly disabled will be able to access anything we can today with amazing voice user interfaces. But between today and that perfect world is a multitude of product designs which will, when taken together, shape what that future will be. And it’s shape might be nothing like the utopia we imagine. We can look at how our modern product designs evolved to find things we can change right now in our future platforms.

Those changes are not obvious day to day, but there were inflection points. I contend that we are in the middle of an inflection point on the frontiers. In voice user interfaces the technology is generally accepted by the public as ‘normal’ and having a smart speaker or talking to your phone is mainstream. That penetration is what drives a second revolution of companies looking to expand their contact with customers. Amazon first did it with simple voice requests for common products, but it’s not hard to imagine everyone else wanting in. Who will design those UIs? How will the platforms change the designs to benefit them? The same point seems likely for the future of VR/AR.

A look at the evolution of GUI products on the desktop, and how mobile apps evolved tells two opposing stories. When home PCs really got going, there was an explosion of software being created once there was enough people to buy it. The explosion was completely unguided and was not controlled by any company. This let to a chaotic environment that is still visible today in desktop software.

The first 4 large mobile platforms were controlled by single entities to certain extents. Windows Mobile and Blackberry being the first attempts were tiny and controlled mostly through the size of the community. The modern platforms of iOS and the Play Store are tightly controlled because the companies have the tools and the business structure, but only because they had the foresight of their predecessors.

You might just project forward and think that because companies have been getting more control, that will continue. But it isn’t hard to imagine a future without that control. Every company and investor sees how much control Alphabet and Apple have right now, so they want a piece of that future. If tons of money pours into that competition, is it that hard to imagine tons of platforms constantly infighting for control leading to a chaotic explosion of product design again?

Where does that leave us today? Well, the standard for digital products in each ecosystem are where they are because the way that got there, not because it was decided to be that way. The company just reacts to the business situation day by day, dictated by the customer, driven by the technology. Small changes by the designers could have changed where things ended up, and thus small changes today by you or me could have that same impact. We need to think about where we are going while we take each step.