It doesn’t really matter if you’re a digital native used to various kinds of current technology, or one who’s so much challenged by it that you’d rather adapt that tech-avoidant attitude you find yourself retreating to every time tech rears its geeky head. User-friendly technology is just what it does: It makes things easier to operate to make tasks easier to accomplish — to make life better for all.
The Design thinker’s Handle
Tech design thinkers handle ideas differently from most of us. Although we get to experience what they usually come up with via the user-friendly online interfaces we commonly use to operate gadgets, maneuver equipment or make ourselves more efficient at work with the use of various apps, design thinkers go through much painstaking efforts to arrive at such equations. Suffice it to say, so that people could manage do handle tech with the least of difficulty, there would always be more geeky tech people who need to create ways to make that possible.
To make it clearer for you, take for example the way your RingCentral VoIP provider might perhaps brief you about creating your phone system. Once all necessary basic information is made available to you via manuals and active face-to-face discussion about how the telecom is supposed to help your retail, work process and workplace connectivity improve, you are left to your own devices. You begin tinkering with the intuitive user interface after your service account gets activated. In ways that might surprise you even, you end up creating a system with very little tech savvy involved: Click on some buttons, type in some numbers and words, drag the cursor from one point to another — the works!
What Really Works
As breezy as the process goes however, you barely realize the amount of tech that went into making things simpler for people like you to do. Tech design thinkers have made such possible owing to their awareness of the following so that user-friendly tech happens:
- Intuition and Prediction.
Computer processors and the operating systems they have in them have all been programmed to respond automatically to actions and commands being made on them by users. Powerful processors nowadays have the ability to intuit or predict the next possible action or command to made on them owing to algorithmic exerted on them by IT engineers. So much so that all these various little applications in computers that work compatibly with each other allow you to type out words correctly, crunch numbers, summarize data, rectify errors — without having to exert more effort than the usual.
- Touch Manageable Features/functions.
Online tech like computers and mobile devices have also become touch manageable and have displays that could be touch managed. This is an advancement that hopes to negate keyboards and keypads totally in the future. From clicking and hitting buttons with mice and keyboards/keypads, users now have added easier to do actions like swipe, flick, shake and dab to their online action lexicon.
- Minimalist Visual Interface that Delights.
Smartphone, tablet and phablet interfaces along with the various apps that could be activated in them have become so visually minimalist and now carry fewer elements that could distract and intimidate users. What drives home the point further to ensure remarkable user experience is the way operation of user interfaces become delightful experiences for users. When it becomes enjoyable to use interfaces, it also becomes easier for tech-challenged people to willingly learn how to use them.