Last night I found a website called Don’t Click It where visitors do not have to click anything to navigate and operate the site. Once you get used to not clicking things, it becomes fairly natural and makes you wonder why we’ve been clicking all these years.
I use Spotlight on my Mac many times a day. Very rarely do I ever go into the Finder or Windows Explorer to locate a file or program. Start typing the first few characters of the file and pop, there it is right in front of you. Computing and communication is slowing moving away from the hunt-click way of computing and towards gestures and predictive actions.
This morning, I came across something called The Social Fabric. It’s a thesis centered on using avatars, predictive menus and pen-based computing to manage your social network. Ok, I just made up predictive menus, but it makes sense that menus should morph to address the context of whatever you’re doing at the moment.
Selections are accomplished with circling, or grouping motions around a cluster of avatars representing your friends. Action are chosen through simple, functional menu selections. Inviting a group of friends to a concert, for example, is done in about 10 seconds.
A lot of online dating is managing your emerging and existing relationships, which is why I thought it was appropriate to mention here. If you haven’t emailed back someone who wants to go on a date, their avatar slumps over and looks dejected. Healthy relationships are displayed with an avatar standing straight up, looking directly at you. You have to see it, go check out the site and the videos.
Some may argue that it’s expensive (computationally, mental retraining) eye candy. This new paradigm of communicating may not seem like a vast improvement over the traditional dating site search-select-communicate model, but it’s a step in a new direction worth exploring, at least to come up with ideas for your next site redesign.
Technorati Tags: user interface
