Digital Interfaces and the User-friendliness

User-friendliness of the Digital Interfaces and the Systems of Control

The digital interface as being transparent or user-friendly describes the device’s ease of usability, also referred to as device’s intuitiveness. In Inventing the Medium, Janet H. Murray (2012) states, “Intuitive means drawing on our unconscious expectations about how things behave, expectations that come from experience and from ideas about the world that we have internalized so deeply that we don’t think about them consciously. Intuitions about the world are often based on repeated experience or established conventions” (p. 9). This is important in understanding that transparency or intuitiveness of an interface does not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from familiarity with the interface and previous experience of the user with a similar device that causes the user-friendliness. As Murray (2012) states, “it is an appropriate design strategy to exploit the user unconscious expectations and knowledge to cue their interaction with a new artifact or process, making the experience feel intuitive rather than difficult to understand or hard to learn (p. 9), which is important for the user-friendliness of an interface that depends on substantial reliance of user’s past recognition of interface functionality. The interface as being transparent signifies its conceptual invisibility.

In order to make sense of the system of control constituted by the interface, it is crucial to understand the idea of a ‘metaphor’. In the article, Impossibility of the Interface, Fuller (2004) described the metaphor as being useful in generating a way for users to imaginally map out in advance what functional capacity a device has by reference to a pre-existing apparatus (p. 100), which is pivotal to understand that Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a metaphor, a means of controlling the machine, as well as a way of grasping its nerve. Fuller (2004) states: “An interface is a contact surface. It reflects the physical properties of the users, the functions to be performed, and the balance of power and control (p. 99)”, which is significant, for that interface is indivisible from the system it is part of. Moreover, interface grants the user the power to monitor and control various separate elements in a device while maintaining the balance by not allowing a user to ‘alter’ the elements. Interfaces compose a system of control through discipline. Fuller (2004) explains the discipline as a ‘mold’ that allows an interface to remain something discrete, neutral that eventually constructs predictability through experience. He explains ‘Control’ as a process of constant ‘modulation’ that demands the constant renewal of adherence to codes and processes. Fuller thus concludes interface to be a manipulation between discipline, predictability and vague devious implication of control. Therefore, for an interface the ‘experience’ is a by-product of a combination of transparency and control. User-friendliness is a technique disciplining the body. Eventually, we are shaped with the interfaces that come to control our bodies, and hence we adapt our bodies to the systems of control. Perhaps, power becomes something through which we adapt our bodies to a system of control. The system of control then becomes synonymous with the “natural-ness” of the interface guiding the process of navigation and getting ‘things’ done.

References:

Murray, J. H. (2012). Inventing the medium. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Fuller, M. (2003). The impossibility of Interface. Behind the Blip, 99-100.