If you have been following StartupDunia for some time, you would be familiar with my penchant for user interfaces (UI). I have been vocal about my critique for sites with poor UI and have applauded well designed sites. Although I am not a UI designer myself, I think well designed UI is crucial  towards user friendliness and user adoption.

Let us take a look at a few amazing innovations in User Interface and how they have disrupted entire markets:

1) Windows:

Hate it as much as you want, but Microsoft brought the friendly Windows UI to common computer users. Although inspired from the original Mac UI, Windows definitely gets credit for taking the UI mainstream.  Even in today’s date, Linux is still heavily geared towards geeks and Windows and Microsoft office continue to thrive – because of their sheer simplicity and ease of use.

2) iPod:

Its not that digital music players didnt exist before iPod arrived. So, how’s it that iPod virtually ended up dominating the entire digital music market ? For starters, the seamless integration of  iPod – iTunes made buying and discovering digital music really easy. But more than that, iPod has been successful primarily because it is a sleek, sexy and extremely user friendly gadget. The click wheel innovation made the iPod a simplistic gadget with no need of the additional clunky buttons (play, stop, rewind etc.).  If one were to describe the interface using a single word, it would definitely be best said as ‘intuitive’.

3) iPhone:

The iPhone has completely reinvented the rules of the game. The multi touch system and the accelerometer have opened up usage possibilities that were unimaginable a few years ago. The multi touch system has so radically impacted the industry that now pretty much every other smart phone being launched has a multi touch interface. iPhone has undoubtedly become the hottest and most sought after gadget over the last couple of years.

4) Wii:

While its competitors were in a mad race to build the fastest, meanest gaming systems with the slickest graphics imaginable, Nintendo headed back to the drawing board and came out with the accelerometer based, motion sensitive remote, which blew the socks off of its competitors. The Wii has become a super successful gaming console, making gaming more mainstream and giving Nintendo a huge lead over Xbox and Sony PS3.

5) Google:

While Google has amazing technology to provide really meaninful results, they literally redefined the search engine. They did away with all the clutter and provided a simple, single search box for the end user. No attempts at cluttering the page with irrelevant ads or anything. While other search engines were becoming more portal-esque, Google focussed on the single search box and ultimatley let its technology do the talking.

Look closely and you’ll notice that the common thread across all the above UI innovations is that they have challenged the status quo. They made us rethink how we interact, how we use the service. Not to mention that each of them have become hugely succesful disruptions in their own niche. They set the trend and others continue to follow.

So the next time you want to disregard the UI, you might want to think again.

If you’re interested in what some of the future UI innovations will look like, read this and this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.