Interface Design

Interface design is focused on the user's experience and interaction. Unlike traditional design where the goal is to make the object or application physically attractive, the goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction experience as simple and intuitive as possible.

Mundus vult decipi, goes an old moralistic saying: the world wants to be deceived. This is especially valid today with the 'user illusion of the world'.

According to Norbert Bolz (2006), user-friendliness means 'functional simplicity in the face of structural complexity, i.e. easy to operate, but hard to understand. A product's intelligence consists precisely of its ability to conceal this chasm of inscrutability. Use thereby emancipates itself from comprehension. Anyone who still talks about intelligent design now means that a device's use is self-explanatory. Yet this explanation does not lead to understanding, but rather to smooth functioning. So to put it stereotypically, user-friendliness is the rhetoric of the technology which consecrates our ignorance. And this design-specific rhetoric now provides us with the user illusion of the world.' (www.mediamatic.net)

The human being is no longer a user of tools, but rather a relay switch in the media syndicate, engaged in a circuit.

Bolz (2006) explains that when you buy a computer, you're not only buying a piece of hardware but also, and above all, a bundle of software - with the promise of user-friendliness. By no means does this imply that the user is supposed to understand what it does, but rather that it will spare him any irritation. A user-friendly computer allows you to forget that you are working on a computer: its interface design protects you from the post-human technology of the digital.