Leveraging Computers Instead of Serving Them | Design Strategist for Google, Golden Krishna

Built with incredible computational muscle, born with the ability to access its own exact location anywhere in the world, created with the innate thinking process to provide more timely and richer knowledge than an entire public library in a millisecond, formed to be able to remember a generation of enlightenment, computing devices have largely turned into this. Us at our worst. The terrible twos. The state of life when you're an emotional wreck struggling with rules and responding to unexpectedness with simple variations of a single word expressed through a limited vocabulary. No, no, no. No, your username is not valid. No, Chase Bank Online requires numbers in your name. No, your name isn't unique enough for Gmail. Pick another name. No, you can't leave that blank. You need to give us your title. Dr., Mr., or Mrs. It is mandatory at the London Heathrow Airport to connect to Wi-Fi. No, your password isn't strong enough. No, it's not long enough. No, it needs an uppercase letter. No, it needs a punctuation mark. No, not that one. No, you cannot use one of your last 20 previous passwords on JetBlue. No, dates have to be MMDDYYYY at the New York Times Online Archive, not MMDDYY. No, I don't care if it'll be another 100 years until that matters again. No, these fields are required. Do it now or I will turn red with rage. That part of the book is talking about the second principle, which is that we should be leveraging computers instead of serving them. If you go to the Smithsonian buildings in Washington, D.C., you'll see a lot of our sort of nation's treasures. This woolly mammoth, a lot of things we've collected over the number of years, our sort of greatest achievements. One of the things you'll see inside the Smithsonian is this supercomputer that IBM made a while back. It's called Deep Blue. It's famous, of course, because in 1997, Deep Blue beat our greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, at a game of chess. We knew at the time that computers could do calculations faster than us, but to outthink us strategically, well, that was a really big deal. So the computer sits in the Smithsonian, but if you compare that computer and its processing power against the computers we hate today, those sort of old nasty Dells that we kind of want to beat up and maybe even throw out the window. Compared to those computers, Deep Blue is pretty weak. Our cheap Dells can Outthink Deep Blue by over 100 gigaflops. The processing power we have at our hands is incredible. Yet we live in a world where we make these systems so that we serve computers. I think we should reverse this relationship. I think we should have computers and computer systems and products that are serving our needs. This is some highlight footage of Junior Seau. He was a big football player in the '90s and early 2000s known for his really big hits. While watching his highlight reel and watching him in games was really fun, Junior is also incredible because of what he did off the field. He was awarded a presidential award for how many thousands of hours he volunteered. He had a restaurant that he opened on Thanksgiving for families with domestic abuse. Junior was a pretty selfless, happy guy. Once during a game when a drunken fan jumped from the stands and tackled Junior on the sidelines, Junior helped the fan get up, wished him Merry Christmas, and never pressed charges. Another time when Junior was at a restaurant and a soldier came up to him to just thank him for his incredible play, Junior inverted the flattery. He said, thank you for your service. Junior then bought the soldier's dinner. Then Junior went to his car, grabbed his own ukulele, came back to the restaurant, and serenaded the soldier by playing him Brown Eyed Girl. He was this really selfless, fun guy to be around. The last few years of Junior's life, he started to fall into this deep, dark depression, and it eventually led to his shocking and unfortunate Suicide. After he passed, it turned out that Junior had something called CTE. It's a brain disease that happens from all those hard-hit sports like football or boxing. And it can lead to things like the depression that Junior Seau had. It's so bad that the NFL has admitted in federal court that nearly a third of players will likely suffer from CTE after they leave the league. It's even scarier as you think about younger players who have less sort of medical attention around them. Even in elite colleges, it's extremely rare for a great football player to report a concussion. CDC has tried to solve it by making an app for that. This is their solution to the problem. It's just basically like a glorified brochure. It does almost nothing to solve the problem. Other companies have tried other things. Reebok has worked on something called Check Light. It's a skull cap that goes underneath your helmet, something that people already wear. You can see this mom putting it on her son here. And on the back, it just has this one LED. And it flashes green intermittently when things are going well. And red when they're not. And it has a sensor and a very simple microchip inside, a very simple, simple computer inside of it, that when high impact happens to the skull cap, it flashes red. That's it. Super simple computer. It's not going to solve all of CTE, but it's going to let a player, a coach, a parent know when it's time to pull someone off the field because there could be brain damage. Today there's a new kind of chore, a new set of numerous mindless errands embedded into our already overwhelmingly busy lives. Over the past decade, these tiny requests have been culminating into a larger and larger ball of more and more of our time, taking us farther and farther away from our friends and family, or allowing us the free time to make our communities stronger by volunteering. These tasks are the result of graphical user interfaces that assume the constant demanding attention as the expected norm. They are the byproduct of screen-based thinking, first-world errands for the almighty computer and the apparent productivity software we have to manage. From their roots in delight and harmlessness— you've got mail— they've grown into an endless stream of to-dos and checklists. As our lives continue to become increasingly digital, these tasks have exponentially increased because the standard paradigm in making new software is that we serve the computer. That we live to click. As each old world thing's digital, the software has more and more requests for you. On a given day, you could have software updates to download and install, passwords to reset, notifications to attend to, files and folders to sort, messages to archive, social media requests to confirm, calendars to update, credit card balances to check, information to verify, storage space to manage and monitor, documents to back up, messages to reply to, photos to upload, flights to check in. These are Digital chores, the maintenance of our digital lives. Oh, a new version of the operating system is available? Yes, I'd love to download it for the next few hours. Geez. Digital chores are nightly, weekly, and monthly errands that can feel just as mundane and forced as taking out the trash. Previously, you forgot to do the laundry and had to wear an old shirt. Now you forget to accept a request and Your friend may not be your friend anymore. You forget to change your password, your account can get hacked, and you can lose all your private pictures. Or maybe even all your friends all get porn in their inboxes attributed to you. No, I swear that's not my dick pic. There are some people who are chipping away at these digital chores, creating products and services that try to reduce the amount of screen time in our lives. One of the better known ones that's been doing this for a while is called If This Then That, which has these sort of manual recipes you put together. You're leaving somewhere, you text a friend that you've left. There's other services called Unroll.Me, which kind of group all your, group all of your emails together. There's a service that recently came out called x.ai. AI, which you can CC for your meeting invites and they can automatically set up some of those meetings. There are other people who are sort of embracing the third and the hardest part about the book, which is to create experiences that adapt for individuals. Here's a problem. A lot of people are kind of terrible with saving money. Generally in the Western world, we don't save much more than about 30 days of our income. There's a startup called Digit, which works without you interacting with it really at all. Once you set it up, once you set up your checking account on it, it looks at how you monitor, how you, monitors how you spend your money. And it looks for ways in which you can save money. And so over time it starts off sort of saving a little bit of money, and then it gets more and more aggressive about how much money it's saving for you. based on your purchases. Digit doesn't even have an app. It all works through text messaging if you need any kind of additional services. There's another startup in the financial space called Even, which is for hourly or freelance workers who don't know when their next paycheck is going to come and don't know how much it's going to be for. And that financial insecurity is not such a great thing. So what Even does is it studies how much you're getting paid on average, and it kind of creates these average paychecks. It balances things out so you can get an expected amount every 2 weeks. So I first wrote about this idea, this crazy idea, the best interface is no interface, way back in 2012, and when I did, got a fair amount of attention, and there's been a lot of people who said good or bad things. There's been some major names who've kind of tweeted about this idea. There's been some coverage in BBC and The Verge. There's been some people at Google who've said some things about it. There's been some people who have said that everything that I'm saying is terrible. This is a piece called Node and No UI, which is about how I'm totally wrong about everything I'm telling you today. There's a piece by Scott Berkun, who's a well-known author, who looked at Node and No UI, looked at what I was saying and said, who cares about any of this? All of this is really stupid. Some people kind of criticize this term, as was done at the beginning of this talk, about interface. Of course, I'm just referencing graphical user interfaces and making it short for that. As is done in major media sources when they talk about graphical user interfaces. Some people ask, well, what happens when these sort of magical services fail and we don't know what's really going on? I think any good system embraces failure. Even automatic doors, something we think of as working brilliantly, have often a push-to-open feature if the power goes out. Some people use user interfaces as a backup, as sort of a secondary experience. So you're having this sort of no UI or no interfaces As a primary, but then you have this backup solution where you can open the settings menu and see what's going on in the user interface. I think that's a pretty neat hybrid step of where we're at. There's this headlamp that Petzl makes, which automatically adjusts the amount that's coming out of it, and it's used often for people who do search and rescue in caves. So they look down at their maps and the light dims, and they look into the deep dark cave and the light brightens, and so this fluctuation in light is really important because they don't want to whitewash their their maps when the light's too bright. And Petzl has sort of found these automatic settings to be great, but Petzl also comes with a piece of software for the small percentage of users who need to adjust those automatic settings. There's Nest, which everyone sort of talks about because its big moment of delight is when it just automatically adjusts the heat and the cooling in your house. And it always has this giant UI available if you want to reteach it new things. Sometimes people ask, how am I going to do this sort of no interface thing? And of course I've written a book about it, but I also sort of put together a toolkit of different kinds of sensors available on smartphones today that you can download for free. And I'm going to end with a reading from the last chapter of the book. One day, I hope you think this book is utterly boring, passé. That you hear about the idea of screenless solutions and yawn. Best interface is no interface? Wake me up when you have something interesting to say. Because if that day comes, remember to celebrate. You'll be living in a better time. Not one drowning in screens and intentionally addictive interfaces that distract us from one another, but one in which typical processes are embraced. When computers serve us instead of us serving them. When technological systems are continuously adapting to our individual needs. A day, probably a few decades from now, when children dress up as their grandparents on Halloween by sticking smartphones to their faces. Look, I'm like Grandpa who stares at his giant phone all day. That day will be joyous. I hope that today's marvel becomes tomorrow's mundane. That no UI is like watching a rerun of Friends. But that day may not come. This book is a journey into just one possible future. Some of the companies I've mentioned for taking us toward that future may have disappeared by the time you've read this book. If there's enough dust on the COVID of your copy, some of the examples in this text may feel ancient. I hope the ideas in this book aren't forgotten, but end up as stepping stones to something far greater, a future in which the best case of a graphical user interface has been understood as no interface. Along the way, there'll be battles to be fought inside companies and classrooms, privacy issues to tackle, and other unforeseen hurdles. But when the philosophies settle, the debaters come to agreement, the doers understand how to get it done, and the business plans start to fall into place, we could have something utterly revolutionary in our hands. And when that revolution finally comes to fruition, we may think of it as the most boring, expected solution. No screens? Tell me something I don't know. Here's to hoping for that boredom. Thank you.