User Interface Design - Post 1

Technology and new information often make old things obsolete. A major component of the well-formed functioning human of tomorrow is the human operating system - an idea that will make much of 20th century psychology obsolete. Critical in its development is the art and science of user interface design. This series of posts is a somewhat imaginative and fanciful sketch of the type of thinking that i think people will develop for using our brains. The idea of developing an actual user interface "in your head" will seem weird and unnatural to most people but, i would venture, is a readily achievable thing if taught and modeled to children during age-appropriate stages of neural development.

Once age-appropriate neural stages have passed the ability to develop such interfaces (e.g. a vivid internal hallucinated world such as the memory palaces used by scholars in the dark ages and made popular in the recent Thomas Harris series about Hannibal Lecter) becomes more difficult to develop in a way similar to the way learning a non-native language becomes more difficult after the age of 7.

That said, just as with language, this doesn't bar people who have already passed these stages from designing and developing such an interface, it just raises the price of admission.


Anyway, as far as a User Interface is concerned it's important to understand some basics of neurological information processing.

First of all, all information is only experienced as mediated by the nervous system. The way you take in, integrate, experience and communicate reality is always by way your nervous system. Specifically, you experience reality, both your 'internal' world and the processed version of the extant or external world, through five sensory modalities. These are:

Visual
Auditory
Kinesthetic
Olfactory
Gustatory

and, as i will suggest in future posts, frequentially* via activity of the pre-frontal lobes of the neocortex and their organization of the neural fields generated by the firing patterns and connections of the vast neural complexes of the brain.

* frequency is experienced and represented via the above mentioned five senses, so any discussions about the language of frequency is still using and building upon the earlier senses rather than a suggestion of some 6th sense. Frequential language as i'm proposing it deals with the frequency of information - both how a person organizes information and how they transmit it.

These systems are fundamental channels for all human experience. THEY ARE THE PRIMARY CHANNELS THROUGH WHICH HUMANS CAN COMMUNICATE. In other words, if there are other ways to represent information - we can only talk about them with the language we have. In this way we're like early reptiles which, only aware of an outside world and a present moment, they couldn't conceive of an internal emotional landscape or a future in which they might move to a bigger swamp. Organizing our informational channels for effective and user-friendly use seems like it should be a top priority of all educational systems.

Along with those channels i'm a proponent of people knowing how they work in general, e.g. having an intimate familiarity with themselves and a majority of the systems that make up the whole of their system, from the digestive to the circulatory, the central and peripheral nervous systems and more...

In conceiving of the design and implementation of our own personal human operating system let's begin with the basic standards and protocols of user interface design, a design intended to make the users interaction experience as simple and intuitive as possible. In other words, the focus is on how a person interacts with his or her nervous system and thereby how they "interface" and interact with the world.

Much of the following is excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Design

There are several phases in the user interface design process. We're covering these topics as they relate to designing and installing our own human operating systems. (Note, if you're actually trying this model on then treat it not as a theoretical model - as you proceed, try on each piece of the HOS and play with your user interface.) The more you try it on, the better it'll be.

Step 1: Indentify and define the purpose and function of the system: This is the organizing priniciple of the entire system. In other words, what are you for?


Alright, that's it for now. I'll get further into this soon. In addition to expanding on the above idea, some of the other pieces we'll address on UID include:


* Functionality requirements gathering - assembling a list of the functionality required of the system to accomplish the goals of the project and the potential needs of the users.

*User analysis -

o What would the user want the system to do?
o How would the system fit in with the users normal workflow or daily activities?
o How technically savvy is the user and what similar systems does the user already use?
o What interface look & feel styles appeal to the user?

*Information architecture - development of the process and/or information flow of the system (i.e. for phone tree systems, this would be a option tree flowchart and for web sites this would be a site flow that shows the hierarchy of the pages).

*Prototyping - development of a wireframes, either in the form of paper prototypes or simple interactive screens. These prototypes are stripped of all look & feel elements and most content in order to concentrate on the interface.

*Usability testing - testing of the prototypes on an actual user—often using a technique called talk aloud protocol where you ask the user to talk about their thoughts during the experience.

*Graphic Interface design - actual look & feel design of the final graphical user interface (GUI) based on the findings developed during the usability testing. This last phase is often handled separately by a graphic designer who also has knowledge in user interface design. However, some user interface designers are also proficient graphic designers.