Interface Design for Humans: Defining Natural Interfaces and Strategies for Creating User-Friendly Interactions
Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) are revolutionizing the way we interact with digital systems, offering a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. These interfaces leverage natural human behaviors such as gestures, voice, touch, and eye movements to create a seamless and effortless interaction.
Key Design Guidelines for NUIs
While a dedicated list of design guidelines for NUIs may not be readily available, combining standard user interface principles with the characteristics of NUIs allows us to identify key design guidelines.
- Leverage Intuitive Interactions: NUIs should use natural human actions like hand gestures, voice commands, touch, and eye tracking to make interactions feel effortless and natural to users.
- Simplicity and Learnability: The interface should be easy to learn and remember, supporting immediate use without complex commands or instructions. This aligns with Norman’s principles emphasizing usability and usefulness.
- Feedback and Responsiveness: Provide immediate and clear feedback for every user action so users know their gestures or commands were recognized and acted upon, supporting user confidence and system transparency.
- Accessibility: Design for a wide range of users, including those with disabilities, by supporting multiple input modalities (speech, gesture, touch, etc.) to accommodate different abilities.
- Error Tolerance and Recovery: As natural inputs can be ambiguous, NUI systems should gracefully handle misunderstandings and provide easy ways to correct errors without frustration.
- Consistency: Maintain consistent interaction patterns and responses across contexts so users can transfer skills easily within the system.
- Privacy and Transparency: Especially when using voice or gaze tracking, clearly communicate what data is collected and how it is used to ensure users trust the system.
- Context Awareness: NUIs should understand environmental context (noise, lighting) to adapt input recognition and avoid false positives.
- Optimize for Physical Comfort: Gestures and movements required should be comfortable and avoid fatigue during prolonged use.
- Direct Interaction: Allow users to control the interface directly, without needing to learn complex commands or procedures.
- Instant Expertise: Take advantage of users' existing skills, reusing common human skills or domain-specific skills.
- Contextual Interactions: Primarily show information that is relevant to the user's current interaction.
- High-Frequency Interaction: Facilitate a constant flow of action and reaction between the user and the NUI.
Examples of NUIs
Examples of NUIs include the multi-touch interface on the Apple iPad and the mid-air body gestures used to control Microsoft's Kinect console. The Reactable, an electronic musical instrument with a tangible user interface, takes advantage of a common human understanding of physical objects.
The Advantage of NUIs
The advantage of NUIs is that user interaction feels fun, easy, and natural because users can use a broader range of basic skills compared to traditional graphical user interfaces. However, some gestures in NUIs may require learning and may not be intuitive initially.
The Future of NUIs
NUIs are considered the next step in the evolution of user interfaces due to their user-friendly nature. To learn more about NUIs, you can read Joshua Blake's book "Natural User Interfaces in .Net" and Daniel Wigdor and Dennis Wixon's book "Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture." The proof of your NUI's success will be a matter that users will decide for you in a very short time on accessing your design.
- Advanced UI design and interaction design must incorporate the natural human behaviors facilitated by Natural User Interfaces (NUIs), in order to create a seamless and enjoyable user experience.
- To foster a successful NUI, one must consider the key design guidelines, such as user-centricness, learnability, responsiveness, accessibility, error tolerance, consistency, privacy, context awareness, physical comfort, direct interaction, instant expertise, contextual interactions, and high-frequency interaction, while leveraging technology for an intuitive and effortless user experience.
