The design of a man-made object is only complete when people use it.

What happened?

Charles Babbage designed the first computer between 1833 and 1871. Then came 1984. The Apple Macintosh computer was invented: the birth of a mass-market PC with a graphical user interface and mouse. A completely new operating system was created to navigate information within this graphical interface.

Since then, screens have continued to shrink. We’ve moved from desktop, to laptop, to smartphone, to iWatch, to GoogleGlass, to — well —anything: the internet of things. The amount of smartphone users reaches 1.75 Billion by 2014.

We’re addicted to our screens.

But while creating and consuming information in 2D, we forgot about space.We forgot that information exists across systems, not just within them. And because we are so addicted to what happens inside screens, we forgot how to be human.

The evolving device

We’re discovering that information exist across systems and not just within them. New interfaces are increasingly designed with human habits in mind. Visually, we’re looking to natural surfaces and elements, which further communicate and respond to our human nature.

Material Design by Google Developers is trying to give people access to meaningful content using human behavior and “develop a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes.” It sounds like a step in the right direction and is fun, neat, and colorful.

When we can design across systems, devices will evolve or disappear. We will not stop consuming content, rather consume it in a way that suits human behaviour, not the other way around.

Delivering content that sounds human

Future interfaces deliver content in more meaningful, relevant ways.Content can stimulate all of our senses and be delivered at contextually relevant times.

Fluid Interfaces is part of MIT Media Lab and is designing interfaces, which allow content to flow across systems. FingerReader is a wearable device that assists in reading printed text by receiving audio feedback of the words and haptic feedback of the text layout. Blind people can now read with their finger, an example of the human body as an interface, assisted by technology.

Audio is expanding not only the internet, but also our relationship with the content itself. Audio is an exciting medium to deliver content because unlike visual information, it doesn’t take up space.

As depicted in Her, we can experience an emotional connection with audio content, because sounds human; and characters and personalities mean that the content is — in a sense human. The Early Edition by Capsule.fm gives content personality using artificial hosts, Miranda and Carl, who read news headlines, weather, entertainment and jokes in between your music. The most sharable and engaging content is actually not necessarily informative content such as news, rather the engaging and personalised audio confessions, artificial jokes and flattery.

Guy Hoffman proves the power of connecting audio with body language. His projects in human-robot interaction combine audio output with posture, which connect with humans on a natural level. In his TED Talk “Robots with Soul”, Hoffman explains how his inspiration from animation and acting resulted in the implementation of body language in robots, which were programmed to improvise music performances.

Still from “Her” by Spike Jonze

Systems are connected

Minority Report offered a vision of the collaborative workspace. John Underkoffler of Oblong Industries worked together with Spielberg on Minority Report and has since delivered a similar technology for the real-world collaborative workspace: Mezzanine. Take a look at the demo Underkoffler presented to Robert Scoble, which shows a truly collaborative workflow.

Elon Musk shows futuristic interfaces and workflows at SpaceX, where the complete design experience has been reimagined, allowing engineers to design more directly in 3D. Implementing a number of technologies, including Leap Motion, Siemens and Oculus VR, as well as NVIDIA and Projection Design. Musk demos the Hand Gesture Holographic Interface to show how SpaceX is improving the engineering and design processes through interaction.

Still from “Minority Report”

The world is our interface

As we increasingly discover that we are no longer constrained to a screen or device, there are new possibilities for interaction with content and our environment. The car offers a unique case for interface design. Here, we should again seek inspiration from human senses, using them compliment the driving experience — or rather — free us to concentrate on driving. Using voice recognition technology and eye tracking technology, as well as new touch interfaces such as Matthaeus Krenn’s proposal for an in-car UI, we can build an intuitive environment, which works together with our own behavior.

Touch is increasingly exciting in interaction design and the future interface, where haptic technology provides a more sensitive and responsive experience with our environments. In his Keynote at Solid 2014, Ivan Poupyrev demonstrates his work with Disney, using haptics to build inspiring, interactive playgrounds with “Beyond Gadgets: Interactive Everything”.

Still from Ivan Poupyrev: “Beyond Gadgets: Interactive Everything” – Solid 2014 Keynote

Contextual content

Not only should the interface be part of our existing environment, the content should react or be generated by our environment. Welcome to contextual content.

Delivering content which is relevant to your context is what we’re building at Capsule.fm and means that information that you hear is relevant to your context: everything from your location, mood, behavior and intentions. Not only do you get the content that you want at a time that suits you, using natural language processing, the content in delivered in an interactive flow.

So say you’ve just heard a news story relevant to your location and in the morning, when you’re on the way to work. We will then bridge that to your music, streamed from iTunes, Soundcloud or WiMP, because you’re on the move. In cases where you are more likely to be relaxing or news is of a different mood, the amount of music and other content is adjusted to suit your context. This is how a morning might sound.

Alive and growing

Systems are living and grow with our input. Our feedback makes them grow and become more intelligent.

As they expand, we can seek inspiration from the natural work in the form of natural surfaces and materials. The iPhone6 Sapphire shows the potential of new materials with light, durable and portable possibilities.

Nature already has design figured out. Constructal law is a universal phenomenon derived from physics to account for design generation and evolution in nature. Adrian Bejan states “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” The distribution of imperfection over time generates geometry. If the flows stops, the system is dead.

User experience in this time of information flow are considered in the documentary “Connecting”, where Robert Murdock describes the process of guiding the user to desired outcomes and the interface as a stage in which props (or features) are used to gently direct the user.

Let’s think of content and information as a fluid, living system, which is moving with us during our everyday lives. Let’s deliver and provide access to that stream, in an intelligent, relevant way, which is in tune with human behavior. Let’s rethink interfaces as our world, rather than devices or trapped within an exiting element.

If you are a designer or developer committed to making technology more usable to via human interaction patterns, Toptal would like to hear from you.

Design no longer needs to happen within a single screen or device. We have reached a new era in history where our bodies, cars, bedrooms, heaters, streets and  just about everything can be an interface.

This article will present exciting technologies and various interfaces with new interactions, as well as take a historical perspective on the evolution of human behaviour with machines. For simplicity’s sake, I like to group human interaction with the environment and technology into 4 ages.

Google’s Project Soli

The Age Of Tools

We used primitive objects and symbols to communicate.

Humans began communicating with symbolic representations carved into any surface. Hieroglyphics were one of the initial ways that humans started communicating, and it was highly symbolic. This symbolism would later develop into art, writing, documentation and story-telling. We can even argue that we have come full circle and are using the symbols on our keyboards to communicate subtleties in communication beyond words, even if they are silly.

The tools that we used to communicate became more and more sophisticated, resulting in things still widely used such as pens.

The evolution of communication

The Age Of Machines

When hardware was the interface.

The industrial revolution placed emphasis on productivity. Welcome to the age of the machine, where we built objects at scale to make our lives simpler.

The typewriter was invented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes. We begun tapping physical keys to make words, still using our fingers, instead of a pen. It helped create a consistent and effective format that could be easily adopted as well as save us time.

The drawback, however, was that we needed to learn how to type. We were mass producing machines and the power shifted to the rise of the machine. Despite designing hardware as the interface, we still had to learn how to use them.

The Age of Software

Learned skills from using hardware become metaphors to teach us how to use software.

When software needed an interface, designers looked to existing hardware and behaviour to make it easy for us to learn how to use it. For example, we looked back to the typewriter to learn how to type on a screen. The typewriter was used to inspire the keyboard to make it easier for us to know what to do. We had already learned to type, so the natural progression was to begin interacting with screens.

We see this same transition with our smartphone keypads looking like mini versions of the very same keyboards and typewriters. Adorable and useful. As we began to touch, we began to define a completely new way of interacting with our environment.

Skeuomorphism is another example of making the two dimensional screen look like a three dimensional world to help users understand how they should interact with the interface. Designers created interfaces that were already familiar by depicting things like controls of a radio or mixer in audio interfaces. Apple famously led this trend under the direction of Steve Jobs. It wasn’t until Jonathan Ive became more powerful at Apple that skeuomorphic design slowly evolved into flat design, punctuated by the release of iOS7 in 2013. We were ready to make the leap to less literal cues and could now appreciate the simplicity of a reduced interface. The current iOS Human Interface Guidelines actively encourage the shift from “Bezels, gradients, and drop shadows sometimes lead to heavier UI elements” with a “focus on the content to let the UI play a supporting role.”

Material design also shifts towards different representation of the third dimension by giving the entire canvas depth, as opposed the the individual UI elements as represented in skeuomorphism. Material design depicts the “surfaces and edges of the material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes helps users quickly understand affordances. The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other.”

Touch is human-centric

On why touch worked

With the rise of the smartphone, we taught ourselves all kinds of funny gestures for the novelty and to be able to use it — and — of course because it was really cool to be able to all kinds of fun and even secret stuff with our hands. We learned the difference between a pinch and a tap and a long tap and invented more gestures than we can keep up with.

We started expanding and contracting as a way of zooming in and out. This behaviour became so natural that I have witnessed grown men try and zoom in on physical maps.

Touch works because it is intuitive. You see babies working tablet devices faster than their grandparents these days, simply because we are born to explore things with our fingers. It’s innate and reminds us of back where we started during the beginning of communication.

Touch is innate

Toptal connects you with designers and developers who take a human-approach to product design.

Touch came with a price

And the user experience often suffered

We wanted to touch everything in sight and along the way, we made up some pretty obscure gestures and made it nearly impossible to find things.

That’s because we hid stuff.

We hid a lot of the main user interface features. A major part of the problem was competition between Android and iOS, where initially iOS lead the way and significantly reduced their Human Interaction Guidelines. The simplicity looked beautiful, but we were just hiding the ugly or complicated stuff for later and often made interfaces more difficult to use. Android emulated a lot of the worst things Apple implemented and it really wasn’t really until Material Design was introduced that there were even consistencies in Android design at all. The myriad of device sizes didn’t exactly help either.

We also forgot about consistency.

A swipe on iOS can mean to read an email, delete an email, archive an email, or playfully connecting with my next Tinder match, depending on the app and the context. As designers, we cling to extensive onboarding sequences just to show users what to do.

Touch only works on big screens

Now we have new devices and they have such small screens that touch becomes difficult. Designers of these devices re-introduce hardware centric features humans struggle with.

Apple watch

Even if your fingers are finer and more dextrous than mine, I still smile at the thought of poking around on our wrists.

You cannot navigate such a complex things as the internet from a hardware centric feature such as the Digital Crown. It is a real-world spin-off from known watch adjusting behaviour, but it is time consuming as well as fiddly.

The age of the self

The world is our interface

Now that the time has come, how do we design experiences and products in a world where any environment is interactive?

The next iteration partly illustrates us coming full-circle, with the Apple Pencil being a piece of technology, both hard- and software which is helping us write again, similar to where we once started: a simple tool and a surface.

It just so happens that this simple tool is a not so simple Apple Pencil and the surface happens to be a pretty advanced iPad Pro. Specifications aside, what is exciting here is that we are now getting to a point that technology is so advanced that we can “unlearn” how to use it.

The Apple Pencil is human centric because it takes 2 things that we are already familiar with: an actual pencil and an iPad, meaning that we don’t need to learn anything in order to be able to use it (unless we need a reminder of how to write with a pencil again).

How can we design products to facilitate innate behaviours, rather than design products that force us to learn new skills? How can we become more human centric in our design philosophy?

Moving beyond touch

Not only did small screens instigate designers and technologists to explore others ways of interacting with technology, new use cases and contexts inspired us to start thinking of different ways that we could use technology.

Voice commands, for example, work great while driving or cooking, but may cause a couple of stares while asking Siri where the nearest erotic massage parlour is on the train commute home.

Voice is a way that we can interact with technology around us. It can be both passive and interactive. The great thing about voice is obviously that we don’t need any hands for that — however there are limitations such as context which mean that it is not always going to be the most intuitive.Voice recognition has also not really been good enough to be trusted until very recently, but now we are at a time that voice recognition is eerily good.

Siri

Virtual reality (VR) was thrust into the mainstream with a lot of hype, supported by the purchase of Oculus Rift by Facebook in 2014. Shortly after, Google presented Google Cardboard at I/O in 2014, a low cost VR solution, a little lighter on the wallet than the $2 billion tag of Oculus, and there are more low-cost alternatives coming. Virtual reality places the user in a computer simulated three dimensional world, allowing us feel immersed in the experience and move way beyond our fingers, hands and voice. Despite allowing us to use our entire body, virtual reality is constrained by the elaborate head gear. 

Influential tech figures, such as Kevin Rose, boldly announced that “Virtual Reality will turn out to be a dud,” elaborating that “consumers will always take the path of least resistance,” a similar argument can be made in terms of usability. I must agree that the novelty factor is great, but anything so interactive needs to feel intuitive. Wearing a huge mask, sometimes tethered to your desktop computer, may well not be that intuitive. We are already one step closer to removing the computer tethering on some platforms, thanks to Gameface Labs, yet still hiding behind the VR mask.

Like touching. But without touching

Project Soli is a tiny radar that can turn basically any piece of hardware into an interactive device, controlled by delicate gestures. It’s from the Advanced Technologies and Projects (ATAP Lab) at Google and has helps make the world our interface.

Now that Project Soli is open for a select group of developers to work on, the future of interaction design is limited only by our range of gestures. Project Tango is  creating devices that we already use to help navigate the physical world. It combines motion tracking, depth perception and area learning to help spatially process information. Because Project Tango is completely open source, the opportunity to innovate is pretty real. There are already some unique consumer products built, including Left Field Labs’ Soundfield and Space Sketchr. Lenovo will be releasing a Lenovo Tango device, the new beginning of using our smartphones to map our worlds in three dimensional space. With a whole lot of new technology and use cases, our job as designers is to make the experiences feel truly human. My ask is that we leverage existing human behaviours and use technology as a facilitator.

If you are a designer or developer committed to making technology more usable to via human interaction patterns, Toptal would like to hear from you.

Design-driven companies have outperformed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years. However, many business leaders fail to prioritize strategic design thinking and are left scratching their heads when website visitors don’t convert or users abandon their products after just a short amount of time.

Luckily, it’s so much easier to find a high-quality designer these days – at least, if you know where and how to look. If you’re looking to take a concrete step to improve your bottom line by hiring a designer to work on your app, website, or product, you can get started in a matter of minutes thanks to the abundance of designers who are available online. Most designers, especially those at a high level, have a strong online presence, and many software developers and designers especially are abandoning typical office careers in favor or online freelance work.

Whether you’re running an e-commerce site that wants revamp its micro interactions, an established company that wants to develop an app, or almost any other kind of business, the following 5 sites are great places to find designers of a high caliber:

1. Toptal Designers

Toptal is best known as an elite network of freelance software developers, but the company also began screening designers in October 2015. This is great news for companies that are looking to hire the best but might not have the time or design know-how to sift through an endless stack of seemingly qualified resumes. Toptal screens each designer in its network with a thorough application process that ensures that each candidate is in the top 3% of design talent. The network includes designers with a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, so you can be sure there will be a good fit for your business’s needs.

When clients come to Toptal with a project, Toptal’s personal matchmakers get on the phone with the client to discuss their aims and needs before hand-matching them with a senior designer from the network that is perfect for that project specifically. The designer is available to start work immediately, and Toptal clients interview an average of only 1.7 candidates before making a hire since the matchers are so skilled at what they do. In addition to many small to medium sized businesses and startups, large companies from J.P. Morgan to Airbnb have had demonstrated success using Toptal’s services.  To learn more and to start your 2-week no risk trial, you can visit Toptal here.

2. Dribbble

Dribbble describes itself as a “show and tell for designers,” and the site is a platform for designers to share their work online to an audience of designers and employers. Founded in 2009, Dribbble has built a loyal designer network that is both talented and proactive in the industry. For businesses, Dribbble is effectively a watering hole for some of the best talent in the industry, and more importantly, a place where that talent is actively creating every day on their own initiative.

Businesses in need of designers can browse designer portfolios to find the aesthetic they like and then privately message the designer in question to see if they’re interested in a job. For added search capability, you can search for designers by location and skill set as well as post a job listing directly to Dribbble’s site. The breadth of Dribbble’s search engine and its well-earned reputation for talented designers make Dribbble a must for any talent search in design.

3. Smashing Magazine Jobs Board

Smashing Magazine is one of the most lauded resources in the design world, providing online articles, books, and ebooks. Its online resources include information on Coding, Design, Mobile, Graphics, UX Design, and WordPress. In addition to these trusted resources, the online site also offers a job board where companies can post jobs for full-time or freelance positions in design, programming, or other related fields.

Since 2008, Smashing Jobs has been “helping great companies as well as gifted job seekers to find their way to each other.” Smashing Jobs has been trusted by companies of all sizes, including Amazon, Lonely Planet, and Tesla Motors.

4. LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search

If you’re not already aware, the professional networking site LinkedIn has over 400 million members and is a huge marketplace for businesses looking to hire talent. While every option on this list has a search function, LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search is easily the most robust search tool for talent of any kind.

Not only can you search your own professional network by looking through your connections, but you’re able to search for designers by skill, company, interests, where they studied, and more. With so many filters, it’s much easier to find a designer who has the skills you need and is the right cultural fit for your company. Even if LinkedIn isn’t exclusively for designers, a lot of design talent is still on the network, and LinkedIn makes sure you can find it.

5. Krop

If you’re not sure what kind of designer you’re looking for, Krop is a great site to make up your mind. Krop is an online portfolio service exclusively for designers, and its goal is not to “show and tell” like Dribbble, but to get designers hired. All the portfolios use the same layout, so it’s easy to navigate the site and quickly look through different designs to find the work you like.

The service has been connecting businesses with designers since 2000, and in the past sixteen years, Krop has made a name for itself, working with companies like Apple, The New York Times, Tesla, Nike, and more. Krop has as much experience supporting enterprises as it does startups, and the site does a great job of catering to different company needs. However, Krop isn’t public, so if you want to browse portfolios and get in touch with Krop’s designers, you have to be a paying subscriber.

6. Referrals

In short, you want to find a designer with a proven track record of success, whether that track record comes from guarantees through screening processes like Toptal’s, a solid portfolio and references, or personal referrals. Personal referrals can be especially reliable if you can find someone you know personally or professionally who has had a great experience with a specific designer, freelance service, or design agency. But no matter what, you want to start thinking about good design as early as possible.
According to Dieter Rams, a legendary designer from Braun, “Design has to be insulated at a high level. Otherwise, you can forget it.” In order to boost your bottom line, your company must treat good design with the utmost importance from as early of a stage as possible. It’s never too soon to start prioritizing design, and it’s never too late to bring on a quality designer or team of designers to bring your business to the next level.