Why the Best User Interface is NO User Interface | Design Strategist for Google, Golden Krishna

So I've worked at Samsung. I worked at a consultancy called Cooper. Now I'm helping Zappos envision their future. So I can answer a lot of those questions if you guys have any Q&A. But today, I'm going to be talking about my book. I did something a little bit unusual in the 21st century, which is that I wrote a book that works well on paper.

Woo!

I published it earlier this year. It's called The Best Interface Is No Interface. Does your book have an interface? Book, well, it depends how you define the term interface. I'm kind of using the abbreviated for graphical user interface. But technically, I am interfacing with paper. So I am going to do a little bit of lecturing, a little bit of book reading. And I'm going to just start out. With a little bit of the beginning of the book. Somewhere at some point in time, we fell in love. I really don't know when. Like all relationships, it seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. From the blur of whatever we were doing before to a passionate, unquestioning love for the modern, handsome, beautiful interface of the moment. Apps. Maybe it was these gently whispered sweet nothings from all the way back in 2009. What's great about the iPhone is that if you want to check snow conditions on the mountain, there's an app for that. Forget that the National Ski and Snowboard Retailers Association reported that only 2.6% of Americans actually downhill ski, or that they did so only about 8 days a year when those nothings were first whispered. When we heard that siren song, nothing else mattered. Love and reason? Well, they're like oil and water. The commercial continued, our pulses quickened, and if you want to check exactly where you parked the car— Don't tease me. We all know the— how to end that phrase. 6 beautiful trademarked words that may have unintentionally fenced in this generation's limitations on technological creativity. There's an app for that. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is $0.99 to download. Name a news source. Odds are they have a recent article, column, or perhaps an entire section devoted to swooning over the latest apps. It may be because reporters want to showcase that they're hip.

Yeah, we know apps.

But it's probably because they're also love drunk with touchscreen oxytocin. An app, just by being an app, doesn't guarantee that it produces anything of merit to anyone anywhere. But please, shh, we must defend our loved one's honor. An app's creation is told as gospel of wonder and of miracle. We're blessed that someone wrote working code that somehow illuminated a dark mythical path to Apple or Google's app catalog. The New York Times featured an App of the Week and had a recurring App Smart Extra column with heart-throbbing titles like A Weather App That Works. It works? What glorious times that are, love. And during the financial crisis, the New York Times featured a Bloomberg app as App of the Week because it revealed, quote, basic stock market data. What extraordinary— Perhaps you too poured a glass of Chablis and queued up Norah Jones to set the mood as you read the touching USA Today piece, 5 New Apps That Will Change Your Life. My heart melts at that opening line, apps, apps, and more apps. Truly life-changing. Or maybe you're thinking, oh, I'll just turn on talking head CNN and forget about my app muse. Think again, my friend. Here are real CNN headlines.

Stuck in snow? There's an app for that.

Remote sex?

There's an app for that.

Moody?

There's an app for that.

No TP?

There's an app for that.

Need to pray?

There's an app for that.

Can't sleep?

There's an app for that.

Need a concierge?

There's an app for that.

Wedding plans?

There's an app for that.

On a health kick?

There's an app for that. Passover? There's an app for that.

Ordination on the go?

There's an app for that.

Passover?

There's an app for that.

Thank you.

Heart attack? There's an app for that.

Save the whales?

There's an app for that. Giving birth?

There's an app for that.

Dead?

There's an app for that.

Being arrested?

There's an app for that.

Want to save cash?

There's an app for that.

World Cup?

There's an app for that.

Sting's career?

There's an app for that.

Britney Spears?

There's an app for that.

Stocking?

There's an app for that.

Want to be a priest?

There's an app for that.

Awesome. I want to start the lecture portion by looking at a picture of a toaster. This is a toaster from the late 1940s. At the time, we were obsessed with aerodynamic forms, fast-moving planes and trains and big cruise ships. So we took the toaster and we made it aerodynamic. When you look at everyday objects, they're reflections of our trends. At the time, in that late 1940s, when we were obsessed with these Streamlined trains, we made streamlined irons. We took the shape of a cruise ship and we formed apartment complexes to look like that. That's no cruise ship. That's my apartment complex. Today we're obsessed with laptops and smartwatches and different gadgets, even failed technology like 3D television.

So we make this.

This is the number one selling toothpaste in the United States. It's called Crest 3D Whitening. It's different than all the other toothpastes on the market because this one is 3D. This is one of the top-selling sunglasses on Amazon.com. It promises you HD vision. This is how a mattress company advertises for a mattress. Not with a picture of a mattress, but with a woman sleeping on top of a fully charged battery icon. Not to be left out, Doritos has started 3D-printed potato chips. These are fun products to talk about, but I think they're reflections of what's going on. And one of the indicators of what people are studying Where we're going is to look at what people are studying, and we're seeing more and more people study things related to technology. Even well-rounded schools with a lot of history, like Stanford, which used to be known for its psychology program, is now known for its computer science program. At art schools across the country, there are interaction design programs popping up and gaining a lot of enthusiasm. There's all this excitement, there's all this momentum, there's all this talent brewing here and out in the world, But so often we do something unfortunate. We set sort of a low bar of what we can actually achieve. We use sort of old, outdated methodologies to solve problems in technology, because no matter what the problem, so often we have the same answer. Question, how do you make a better car? Above is one of the earliest patent drawings for an automobile. The technologists of the day solved a real problem with transportation. And as a result, the car changed the way we live, the way our cities are built, who and what we can see, and when and where we can see them. So today, utilizing the amazing technological progress we've made in the over 100 years since, what have modern technologists used to improve the car?

Answer?

Electricity. Slap an interface on it. Who needs to look at the road while driving? Leaning over to touch a screen is so much more fun. Tesla is one of the most innovative companies in the world. That's why they've got a 17-inch touchscreen center console. Sure, there are some haters. Some lost soul at The Verge wrote, I don't want a web browser in my car. More importantly, I don't want the drivers around me to have one. But consider scroll bars in your center console. I know.

Amazing.

Question.

How do you make a better trash can? Answer. Slap an interface on it. Slap an interface on it. Hope you got this obvious one. You can make a better trash can by turning it into a $47,000 LCD recycling bin. So that you can see if it's raining outside when you're standing outside in the rain. 100 of these incredible bins were installed in London just before the 2012 Olympic Games to help the city show off its futuristic wonders. And why not? Screens are so futuristic. Question, how do you make a better restaurant? Answer?

Interface.

Put an interface on it. Slap an interface on it. Customer service saviors like Chili's and Applebee's have installed these kinds of touchscreen ordering systems in thousands of restaurants across the country to replace frightening conversations with another person. A Chili's senior vice president once told the Wall Street Journal that the interfaces get people to buy more stuff. like coffee and desserts that flash on the screen. That's obviously a great thing for America's diet. And since I'm basically just staring at my phone the whole time while dining with my friends anyways, what's the harm with another screen on the table? This is a set of job listings from some of the top technology companies across the country. Notice something a little bit unusual about these job listings. They advertise for these sort of UX/UI designers, user experience/user interface designers. But user experience and the things that go into it, and user interface design and the things that go into it are different. A user interface designer is looking at all the components that go on a screen, how to make it visually appealing, how to make it understandable for someone. It's an important job, but it's different than being an experience designer. Than looking at UX, which is looking at larger problems, having empathy, talking to people about and observing their typical processes. But when you confuse the two, when you say solving problems is your job and building screens is your job, it becomes your job to solve problems with screens. But good experience design, good UX, isn't just a set of good screens. It's a good experience. There's a lot of confusion about the purpose of design and technology today. Part of it is because we use a lot of poor metrics to evaluate if a design is good or bad. We think about things like how many clicks, how addicted do we get someone to something, how hooked do we get someone to something, instead of the real things that design is about, which is about elegance, and efficiency, and building customer loyalty, delivering and creating that great experience. Earlier this year, The Verge published a piece called The Engineers of Addiction. It was about how people in Silicon Valley were taking inspiration from slot machines that were creating addictive gambling. That's not what we should be aspiring to, to do. In the book, I have a chapter called Addiction UX, which talks about this sort of perverse notion of what design has become in technology. And unfortunately, what we've done is our output has become more and more screen time for more and more people as we try to get people addicted to our services. As a result, children in the United States look at a screen for about 2 hours a day. Teenagers look at a screen for a little over 7 hours every day. Keep in mind, they're in school. Then there's adults. We look at screens about a little over 8 hours a day. Of course, there's consequences to all this screen-based thinking. We're constantly distracted from our friends and family. The CDC estimates that 1,000 people every day in the United States get into a car accident because they're distracted by the screens in their car. The color temperature of our screens is created To mimic midday. We do that to produce these deep blacks and bright whites. But when we mimic midday color temperatures on our screen and we look at them at night, it's been scientifically proven to throw off our circadian rhythm and ruin our sleep cycles. Earlier this year, WNYC, the nation's largest public radio affiliate in New York City, had a series called Bored and Brilliant. It was about how there are studies out there that show our times in which we're most bored are the times in which we have our most creative thoughts, our most original thoughts. With all these startups trying to solve for micro-boredom and all these companies trying to figure out how they can get more and more into our lives, we are less creative as a nation. And don't get me wrong, there are good things about screens. These slides wouldn't exist if it wasn't for screens. You might not be here if you didn't hear about the information for this talk and arrive here. But I think thinking about how computing has changed and thinking about how technology has changed, we can shift the way we make it. We can reduce the amount of screen time that's necessary for a lot of the products and services that we create.

I mean, it wasn't that long ago that our lives were filled with paper.

And there were people at the time who dreamed of a paperless world. Now, instead, our lives are filled with screens. And I think we should dream of a screenless world. I actually think that the best interface is no interface. And so I wrote this book about it. It's mostly commentary, but it has some diagrams and information about how and why we should get there. Thank you.