I recently watched a TED video which made me think about the future of interface prototyping. It was from 2010 and featured John Underkoffler, the inventor of a point-and-touch interface called “g-speak”, which was a totally new way of interacting with data – navigating information in 3D. He predicted that g-speak would change computer interfaces. Two year later, we can see that interfaces and the process of interface prototyping have come a few steps closer to his predictions.
One thing John Underkoffler said in his speech that struck me as prophetical is that we are used to human-computer interaction that involves one computer, one screen, one mouse and one person, but it might not be like that soon. Interface prototyping and interfaces themselves have become a lot more space-oriented and stopped relying on a mouse as the main operating device. Touch-screen devices are one of the biggest recent developments. They are a huge move from traditional computers. I enjoy the way my phone goes on silent when being turned over and I am sure touch-screen devices will understand more spatial commands in the future. No interface prototyping tools can ignore the peculiarities of prototyping for touch-screen interfaces as this is one of the fastest-growing markets at the moment.
That the mouse may be becoming obsolete is not the only important trend in UI design. Human-computer interaction does not involve only one human anymore. Most of the app, web, and desktop interfaces support collaboration and interaction between different people. Modern interface prototyping software encourages experts from different fields to work together to create complex interfaces with increasingly elaborate user experience. It is hard to imagine that some of the collaborative tools we use in our offices today were not there only a couple of years ago. With this incredible development of technology I expect interface prototyping to be an important industry in the future.
