Interactions - November/December 2018

to once again welcome outside ones to reinvigorate tired products.

Returning to my earlier examples, we saw this effect in desktop GUIs, which, after a period of intense innovation and market growth in the 1980s and 90s, largely cemented around the same concepts: a desktop, overlapping windows, icons, hierarchical file systems, a cursor, and so on. It does not matter if you run MacOS, Windows, or some flavor of Linux—they are all basically the same thing in different skins. Likewise with smartphone interfaces: grids of app icons, a shelf with favorites, full-screen apps, notification dropdown, app-centered file organization. Of course, this hasn’t stopped the HCI community (including me) from cranking out hundreds of papers a year on refinements and extensions to desktop and mobile GUIs. This is fine, and even good research, but we should be honest with ourselves about the potential for impact at this point in these categories’ lifecycles.

When companies have tried to innovate mature user experiences, it tends to go poorly. Perhaps the canonical example of a mature product with a large user base is Windows. Microsoft launched a dramatically redesigned interface with Windows 8, which led to so much customer consternation that Microsoft had to regress the design in subsequent versions to a more classic desktop experience. Just this year, Snapchat, with its hundreds of millions of users, had to roll back a substantive redesign after its user base ignited. While you may have strong opinions on these interfaces in hindsight, I can assure you that each was designed and vetted by hundreds of experts before release.

No doubt these designs were good
in some ways, but they were also
different, and ordinary customers
(reminder: you are not like the user)
don’t like different once they’ve
integrated a product into their
lives and businesses. Thus, change
is hard, and why the HCI research
community is right to lament its
inability to get HCI innovations into
products. It’s true: If it can be called
a product, it is almost certainly too
late. The window of opportunity is
before it is a product, and probably
before most people think it can be a
product.
Thus, we’re faced with a dilemma
as a community: When ideas have
real users and real value, our ability
to launch HCI innovations tends
to fall on deaf ears. I do not mean
to say it is impossible, just very
challenging. Even if you are well
positioned in industry, I’m sure
you would agree that bringing new
features, let alone new products, to
market is a huge battle. On the flip
side, when HCI innovators invest
efforts early, before products and
markets exist, the work can feel
speculative and decoupled from
real-world problems. I’ve certainly
felt this in my own research—why
again do people want an unwieldy
computer strapped to their shoulder
projecting onto their arms when
a smartphone is so much more
practical?

THE DILEMMA ZONE

The Technology Lifecycle S-Curve
is limited in that it considers only
one generation of innovation,
but technology and society are
constantly reinventing themselves,
so the progress of technology and
their markets is very much a series
of S-curves. Innovation enables
new products while killing old
ones. Think Blockbuster to Netflix,
CDs to streaming, or taxis to ride
sharing. It’s extremely difficult
to keep a large, mature user base
happy while also rapidly evolving
a product. Instead, companies
with mature products tend to
focus on sustaining innovation—
improvements that make their
existing products better and their
customers happy. Newcomers, with
fewer expectations and smaller user
bases, can disruptively innovate.
This is the basic premise of Clayton
Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma,
articulated in the eponymous 1997
book [ 10]. In between two S-curves
is a dilemma zone (Figure 6, left).
If the disruptive innovation is led
EMBRYONIC GLINT GROWTH MATURITY AGING
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tia
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Trough of Disillusion
Figure 5. HCI Intellectual Impact Curve.