User s Dream--Designer s Nightmare

User’s Dream—Designer’s Nightmare

In an idealized version of the future, mobile phones will be designed carefully to meet our needs. The experience of using mobile phones will be both efficient and emotionally satisfying. The devices will learn our habits, and use that knowledge to organize features and content in the order most effective and relevant to us. Our closest friends will have controlled access to our private information. This enhances and intensifies the relationships with our loved ones, family, friends, and colleagues. We will get more attached to our mobile phones because the phones reflect the things that we find important. The phones will become true mobile companions to us.

The important themes of the future—good interaction design, emotional expressiveness, adaptivity, sharing, and privacy—are interestingly entangled. Good interaction design has to be combined with an understanding of the emotional value of the product. To overcome information overload, adaptive products can log user activity to improve information search accuracy. Adaptation and user customization are different techniques for the same goal. The accumulation of information about the user in adaptive systems is a privacy risk. On the other hand, if we want to create products with emotional value, the device needs to know the user to respond in a meaningful way. Information itself is a privacy risk, but it becomes emotionally significant only when shared with other people.

Because of the integral links between these themes, designers won’t have the luxury of considering them one at a time when building future products. It is an attractive idea to include them all in a futuristic product concept. The result would, however, probably be unacceptable to users, who would have too many abstract principles to adopt. These themes are more properly introduced to the market slowly, in small steps at a time, and without hype. For the user, the future seems interesting, if confusing. For the designer, despite all the challenges, the future confers potential to change and enhance the way people live.