“Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces.” He continues by saying that the recent wave of user interface innovation is proving that the users-are-stupid train of thought is losing speed. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn’t want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.
User interface was not the place to be innovative. He claims that the user interface world was not one to be innovative in. According to the author, every application was full of these widgets, “and nothing else”. The article explains that until not too long ago, we were living in a world of Windows-dominated user interfaces, which presented a standard set of user interface elements (widgets). While the article makes some good points, it also contains some generalisations that I find rather debatable.
The interface will change according to the actions the user takes present a set of minimal options, and show other options as the user goes along. A contextual user interface – as the name implies – is an interface which adapts to the current wishes of its users, the context. Read Write Web has an interesting article on the concept of the contextual user interface.
