Interface Evolution

I was chatting with a guy named Chris Ashford, who is a co-founder of Southern California Outdoor Adventures, a firm that organizes adventures and connects adventurers.  He is also a bit of a techie and we were talking about Jute and our business network visualization interface.  He made this observation (paraphrased):

It sounds like an evolution of the interface.  Kinda like going from DOS to Windows.

We’ve used a lot of metaphors to explain why we believe that interactive visualization will be the interface of the future for enterprise relationship management software, but never operating systems.  Spreadsheets and charts–yes.  Weather data and radar imagery–yes.  PC and Mac–yep.  But never Dos and Windows.

But I think Chris is right.  This is the metaphor.  A visual interface makes it easier to absorb more information and act on it, while lowering the knowledge and experience required to adopt a piece of software.  It also simplifies tasks, and can make certain functions dramatically more efficient.  An operation that was very time consuming in the DOS command prompt–like moving a folder full of files to a set of new folders with the files distributed across the folders based on their contents–became easy to understand and easy to perform in Windows.   What’s more, a world full of new features and functions were inspired by this new interface.

In this way, operations that are difficult to understand, information that is hard to process and act on and tasks that time-consuming and complicated in a traditional relationship management interface are made simple, intuitive and approachable in a visualization interface.  Furthermore, this interface not only provides a context rich user experience, but also leads to waves of innovative thinking that results in an entirely new conception of appropriate features and functions.

So thanks, Chris, for the inspiration and the good analogy.   And thanks to Matt, Dan, James and our whole team who have helped pioneer a new way of approaching interface design for business networks and enterprise relationships.  I’ll write more on this soon.