
What Is Zero UI? (2015) - jonbaer
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048139/what-is-zero-ui-and-why-is-it-crucial-to-the-future-of-design
======
TrevorJ
I really hate the corner of the tech industry that takes old ideas and renames
them and then goes "hey look at this new trendy idea I thought of!".

Just because you move the user interface off the screen and into physical
space doesn't make it "Zero UI". People have been designing ways to interface
with machines in physical space ever since somebody figured out how to put a
handle on a rock and make it a hammer.

~~~
woah
I could have left this comment on a number of comments here. These are an ugly
artifact of hn's eagerness to call bullshit on anything and everything. "Zero
UI" is a convenient shorthand for saying "interactions with technology not
involving a traditional 2d box-based user interface. Zero UI is a lot quicker
to say. That's what words are all about. You have a problem with language? Go
debunk something that actually needs to be debunked instead of leaving one of
the same 10 crabby, predictable comments that are already in this thread.

I have no clue if "zero ui" is actually a good thing or whatever, but I know
that your comment and the rest like it add nothing new to the conversation.

~~~
fiatjaf
Does yours?

~~~
TrevorJ
I wrote the parent comment, and I actually think his reply was worthwhile.
Ideas are things that should be challenged IMO

------
marknutter
I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a
local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that
didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to host
all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit, and
all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's file
system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to update
the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in their shared
Google Drive account.

All of the pictures come directly from their Facebook account via the Facebook
API and the weekly PDF newsletter is sent using Mailchimp and pulled from
their Google Drive as well. They went from almost no engagement from the staff
to close to 100% engagement after we implemented the system.

Before that the site was built on Drupal and needlessly complex. Nobody used
it. It's so easy to forget how daunting learning another user interface can be
for the average person. We may think we're being clever when we create our
beautiful snowflake UI's but all we're doing is adding more work to somebody's
already full plate (and K-12 teachers' plates are overflowing). There's a lot
of cognitive overhead that comes with things like remembering
username/password combinations, how to upload files to a website (or
understanding what that even _means_ ), navigating around a website, editing
text in something other than Microsoft Word, and other skills and knowledge we
take for granted.

With the Google-Drive-As-A-CMS implementation, none of the teachers had to
learn anything new. They simply needed to leverage skills they were already
expected to have (filesystems, Word, Excel, Powerpoint).

I'd love for more of us software developers and designers to take a step back
and ask ourselves the question "am I making my user's life easier, or am I
adding complexity to it?". The honest answer might give us pause.

~~~
aikah
> I'm a huge proponent of the Zero UI movement. I gave a talk last year at a
> local Google DevFest about a CMS I created for a Priest friend's Church that
> didn't have any user interface to speak of. It relied on Google Drive to
> host all the files that the staff and teachers at his Parish needed to edit,
> and all they needed to do was leverage their existing knowledge of the OS's
> file system and Microsoft Word to do it. A script runs every half-hour to
> update the static site based on the changes to and additions of files in
> their shared Google Drive account.

Shouldn't you call it "integration" instead of this buzzword ? The user has an
existing system and ecosystem of tools and you just wrote a script to
integrate your program with these existing tools ?

If I use emails or SMS to update a blog online I didn't invent anything, I
just didn't code the email client , the SMS client or the phone the user takes
advantage of.

Business integration is what people have been doing since the beginning of
modern development there is no new movement, tech, trend, or paradigm here.

------
Chris_Newton
The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most
of what we’re really talking about here, is that we didn’t get to where we are
today by accident.

As long as humans have eyes and trichromatic vision similar to what we have
today, a 2D RGB display is going to be a useful medium for presenting
information for us.

As long as humans have ears, audible presentation and vocal interaction are
going to be of limited usefulness because they are so disruptive for _everyone
else_.

As long as humans have small, light fingers with fine motor control, devices
like keyboards and mice and joysticks and trackballs and touchpads and
touchscreens are going to be useful for controlling a system.

As long as humans have big, heavy arms with imprecise muscle movement, 3D
spacial interactions with sweeping, dramatic arm movements will belong in the
movies, where the hero can find the bad guy in a few seconds instead of three
days of tedious searching.

No doubt presentation and interaction methods will continue to evolve, but
fundamentally we humans will probably still have the same senses and motor
skills in ten or twenty years that we have today, so radical change seems
unlikely in the near future. It’s also hard to believe that either natural
language processing or data mining and predictive systems will advance so much
in the next few years that they will supplant other means of interacting with
technology rather than supplementing them, so again it’s hard to see
established tools like keyboards and screens going away any time soon.

~~~
bsder
People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even with
the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans.

I can go through your crappy PowerPoint deck in 5 minutes, or I can listen to
you drone on badly for 60 minutes.

I ban PowerPoint from meetings where I need communication to occur explicitly
because of this. Of course, if we're just "flying the colors" for management,
then PowerPoint is required.

~~~
the_af
> _People also forget that vocal communication is "imprecise and slow". Even
> with the most powerful AI on the planet--other humans._

This.

It drives me nuts that some people still think a voice recognition interface
-- even if that's at all possible in the more general case -- is necessarily
the best UI. Or gestures. Look, in a lot of cases I wouldn't _want_ to have a
person listening to me while I explain what I want done as I wave frantically.
Humans are notoriously bad at understanding some sorts of instructions. Why
would I want to introduce this ambiguity to my computer?

------
panic
This article from 2013 does a good job describing the problems with "zero UI":
[http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-
ui](http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui).

~~~
andrewflnr
Hm, I wasn't sure at first but that's actually pretty compelling. It seems
like there are some good ideas in the NoUI movement, but you still need to let
the user know what's going on.

------
dawnbreez
Keyboards are here to stay, most likely. They're hilariously good at their
job, especially when mix-and-match use of language is present or a made-up
word is involved.

------
cwt137
In terms of things like the Amazon Echo, it is not Zero UI, but more like Zero
Visual UI. There is still a user interface, you just can't see it.

------
brooklyndude
Think have to give some credit (lets say LOTS) to Kai Krause of Kai's Tool
fame.

At his talks he would espouse about zero UI way back when, just a black
screen, and nothing else. That's it. We all would just go WOW! We were blown
away.

I think now he lives in a castle and just meditates all day __ or something
like that. :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause)

