Peter Cochrane: Interfaces are hell. How can we make them better?

Getting to grips with a new user interface is one of life's biggest frustrations, says Professor Peter Cochrane. There must be something better

For the past 30 years I have purchased the same brand of car. Boring you might think, but they have served me well and I am not a petrol head. I also have to admit that the same is true for all my technologies, such as laptops, mobile phones, televisions and domestic appliances. The break point for me is a brand or supplier that disappoints and/or upsets me. This is the moment when I invest time in making a big change.

How come I'm so stoic in my brand loyalty? It's easy: it's the interface!

I just don't want the grief of having to learn a fundamentally different interface every time I change out my hardware. It is bad enough when new technology comes on the market and I have to get to grips with yet another interface as most are just not as intuitive as I need/prefer.

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After around 100 years of manufacture you might think that the automotive industry would've stabilised the ‘cockpit' so that drivers can easily swap vehicles without having to look for the indicator, lights, radio, air-con, sat nav and all the other everyday controls. The same might be true for the IT industry, but the reality is it is still evolving fast and it isn't clear where interface designs might stabilise.

My most recent ‘interface like' is the voice-driven AI devices now littered around my home and office, not to mention the apps in my car and on my mobiles and laptop. So, I am dictating this blog as opposed to typing. I prefer this for many reasons: First, I'm a poor typist; and, second, I actually write as I speak and talking to my laptop is so much easier.

The only difficulty I have with voice interface is the variability of the commands. Only five years ago I was having to complete training sessions to get the speech technology to recognise what I was saying. Now, I can talk to any speech device and they understand me more or less first time.

My biggest degree of interface angst now comes from my growing collection of healthcare devices that increasingly link, talk to each other, and present me with pre-analysed data followed by acquiescence, where I just let the machines get on with such tasks without any oversight or checking. They just seem to be better and more accurate than I; and, ultimately, they define the limits to my creativity and production. In short; the more they subsume and do, the more I compete and complete.

So at this point I have to confess to a very high level of finger confusion! Was that a single finger swipe; two or three fingers? Left-right, or up-down? A single or double tap? For me this is the multi-device, multi-OS, multi-app nightmare. I have great difficulty remembering which and what applies where, and I am increasingly subject to some weird and wonderful outcomes and discoveries!

The reality is that my devices are starting to train me to do the right thing. However, as a training regime it is tortuous and protracted, and sadly there appears to be no easy way out. Learning a new interface for me is about as bad as learning a new software language from a standing start.

I can't help feel that the ideal paradigm is going to be something like HAL 9000. When I can have a conversation with devices using rational language using a multitude of expressions and gestures with a performance that exceeds a human I will have arrived!

ProfessorPeter Cochrane OBE is the former CTO of BT, who now works as a consultant focusing on solving problems and improving the world through the application of technology. He is also a professor at the University of Suffolk's School of Science, Technology and Engineering

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