“In an age when we’ve become increasingly reliant on tech, most user interfaces are shocking”
Creating good user interfaces is an immensely skilled task. You need to come up with something that’s functional yet simple. An interface that’s naturally intuitive, where you don’t need to keep referring to the manual – more likely a PDF these days – to work out how to do something.
It’s a level of simplicity that Apple largely mastered around the time of the original iPhone, although sadly those skills seem to have faded alongside Steve Jobs. Apple user interfaces are now full of “you need to know how to” where they used to be more “it’s immediately obvious how to”.
It’s not just onscreen stuff, either – physical user interfaces can also be intuitive if well engineered. As an example, I have two pocket DAB radios sitting in my desk drawer: one made by Pure, the other by Sony. The Pure radio has an okay user interface. Well, okay-ish. The Sony, on the other hand, is superb. I can remove it from the drawer with my eyes closed, switch it on, change station, adjust the volume. All without opening my eyes. I can just about switch the Pure radio on in the dark, but that’s my limit. Yet both of these radios do exactly the same job. They’re similarly sized, similarly priced, and aimed at the same audience. They ought to show the difference between these two radios at design school.
In an age where we’ve become increasingly reliant
