| The thing about computers is that yeah, they're awesome at communication, but they do a lot of other stuff too that has nothing to do with person to person transmission of information. IMHO task-oriented UI makes the most sense because I use my computer as a general-purpose tool to get stuff done. In all use cases I find myself performing a type of task. Only in a subset of cases do I find myself communicating with a person. I guess I'd call myself more of a power user, but when I look at what I've got going on my computer at night it typically looks like this: - playing a video game - talking to arbitrary group of friends on skype over headset - streaming video to twitch (to whomever is watching) - programming my side project on my laptop during downtime (waiting for people to connect in-game, etc.) - browsing the web (looking up game items, watching funny videos, researching some kind of programming thing I'm figuring out) - monitoring my inbox - monitoring my twitter feed Talking to my friends on Skype is definitely direct person to person communication. But even then, I think more along the lines of "1. I want to have a group conversation with Friend A, B, and X, 2. I'd like to communicate with them through the medium of Skype, 3. open Skype 4. add the specific friends I want to talk to to my conversation, 5. go ham". There's no one friend in particular I would "open" first, and subsequently open other friends into. That seems backwards. It's more about what I want to do, not necessarily who I want to talk to. |
The real problem, which the author does not discuss even though it's implicit in some of his examples, is that many of the apps on a typical phone (or desktop computer, for that matter) aren't the right verbs; they're verbs that were easy for the programmer to program, not verbs that are easy for the user to use. You fix that by making better apps, not by switching from app-centric to people-centric design.