Cool New Technology

There is one final pretender to the throne of interaction design, and that is technology itself. Microsoft, in particular, is touting this false panacea. Microsoft says that interfaces will be easy to use as soon as it can perfect voice recognition and handwriting recognition. I think this is silly. Each new technology merely makes it possible to frustrate users with faster and more-powerful systems.

A key to better interaction is to reduce the uncertainty between computers and users. Natural-language processing can never do that because meanings are so vague in human conversation. So much of our communication is based on nuance, gesture, and inflection that although it might be a year or two before computers can recognize our words, it might be decades if ever before computers can effectively interpret our meaning.

Voice-recognition technology will certainly prove to be useful for many products. I think it is foolishly optimistic to think that a new technology will be any better at rescuing us than any of the others were. Technology requires design to be a complete solution for real users, regardless of the combination of technologies we use.