Successful User Experience and User Interface Designs are inherently intuitive and simple. Not necessarily simple in the “less is more” aspect alone; but rather in that the designs focus on essential tasks – and provide an experience which allows for completing those tasks easily and efficiently.
With this in mind it is not surprising that many modern Desktop UI Designs are being influenced by Smartphone UIs; for they, by necessity of constraint, address many design challenges which can be easily overlooked in Desktop UI Designs.
Both Apple and Microsoft have borrowed from their respective Mobile designs in their latest Desktop OS offerings; Lion and Windows 8.
Ultimately, I believe this convergence of the Mobile and Desktop paradigms will lead to better User Experiences. In fact, I have been leveraging many mobile concepts in Desktop UIs for some time now to much success.
Sad, isn’t it, that many a UX designer didn’t start thinking about these design challenges until they were forced to? I’d like to think that we all would go to great lengths to ensure that our UIs were as “usable” as possible, regardless of platform, but I think that has unfortunately not been the case.
Hi,
Thank you four your nice writing on The convergence of Mobile and Desktop UI Design.
Thanks.
I agree – desktop designs are evolving as designers and developers become more fluent in the nuances of User Experience design through having to consider multiple devices in their work. Controversially however, I’m not so sure that convergence should be the goal; for me it’s all about context of use. While users expect a similar brand experience on multiple devices they don’t necessarily expect the same interface experience. I would advocate people to design for context using the technology available on each and every platform but design a responsive user experience that ensures cross platform brand consistency.
Hi Blair,
Yes, I would certainly agree that context is always key. I believe the idea is not so much a goal of convergence in terms of one design for multiple form factors, or even that one form factor will provide a better design in multiple contexts; but rather, how desktop designs can benefit from lessons learned and new design patterns and concepts used in the smaller form factors. Designing for the smaller form-factors essentially provides a good opportunity to rethink previous desktop designs from a different perspective and, where applicable, to borrow successful concepts which could apply.
Best,
Eric