Don't reinvent the wheel, reimplement it.
I recently went to the Mix conference in Las Vegas, where I got to learn and see a lot of very cool things, but undeniably, one of the stars was design researcher Bill Buxton. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what he said in his portion of the keynote, and I think it boils down to one simple sentence.
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Buxton made a point that designing a natural user interface boils down to creating an interface that takes into account what kind of training the user has, what kind of habits they’ve developed, where the user is, when they are, and how much money they make. While it sounds like quite a laundry list, another way of describing it is to simply say: Don’t reinvent for the sake of reinvention, simply reimplement what was already there before.
It really kind of opened my eyes as a designer. It’s made me realize that as technology moves forward, it’s not important to create a computer program and force everyone to learn it. Instead, it’s more important to think about an application from an industrial design perspective, and ask how an interface can be made more like what the user would have used before computers were invented.
In other words, in the future, the more technology advances, the less important it will be for the masses to learn how to use a computer.