Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner
Over the past four years, the Walt Disney Company has been engaged in a secretive effort to redesign the Disney World experience. It’ll go like this: You buy your ticket online and plan all the details of your visit. Then you’ll get a wristband in the mail, which will be a passport to the experience that you’ve curated. Snug around your wrist, the so-called MagicBand will use radio frequency to communicate with sensors around the park, all orchestrated by software that effectively turns Disney World into a computer interface. You can enter the park by holding your hand up to a kiosk; you can arrive at shows with 30 seconds to spare, having already reserved your seats; you can jump onto rides you’ve selected at preselected times without waiting in long lines; you can buy anything you want with a wave. An It’s a Small World character could call you by name and wish you happy birthday. So could Mickey, who can also greet you at a preselected meeting time. This is all in the service of fun, of course, but it is also a glimpse of the future: an integrated experience, a smooth hybrid of real-world and digital interactions.
This represents a new frontier for design. Over the past 30 years, as every facet of our lives, from our shopping to our schooling, has migrated onto computer screens, designers have focused on perfecting user interfaces—placing a button in just the right place for a camera trigger or collapsing the entire payment process into a series of swipes and taps. But in the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturized mobile computing, our digital interactions won’t take place simply on screens. As the new Disney World suggests, they will happen all around us, constantly, as we go about our day. Designers will be creating not products or interfaces but experiences, a million invisible transactions.