Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows...

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

HCI : Morphable Interfaces introduces new challenges

Lately I have been working on a number of applications where the requirements to the UI has been quite extensive. The paradigm of UI in RIA's are now getting more and more well-understood among the GFX departments, XD departments, IA departments, etc. and this has triggered something resembling a revolution in advanced UI's.
Among one of the new paradigms is the morphable interface where no elements are static in their representation, but on the contrary have many different and often incoherent states.
I have chosen the wording "morphable interface" as all elements now have many representations all depending on the overall state of the application combined with the fact that movement now has taken a new position as it now is used to communicate the change of state: hence the Adobe coined slogan, "movement matters".

Having many different incoherent application-states with an equivalent set of elements combined with an effect being played while transitioning between two states defines a morphable interface.

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