Radical UI

In the last few weeks, I have had a chance to visit Oracle UX design lab, talk to Infor’s design agency and interview folks about Fiori for my sequel to SAP Nation. I also had a chance to see a fabulous Microsoft demo which pulled together Skype for Business, Cortana’s voice based personal assistant, Surface Hub display, machine learning via Delve and a variety of Apple and Microsoft mobile hardware.

Enterprise UX is going through a revolution. Or so it would seem.

But then I see FastCompany take Apple to task for lagging. Apple lagging when it comes to UX?

"This year's WWDC was a tacit admission that Apple needed to play catch-up. Cupertino spent so much energy over the past five years paying attention to the surface details of their products, it ignored a seismic shift in the industry: AI is the new UI"

Then, I see John Underkoffler, who designed the gesture based interface in the movie Minority Report and is now CEO of Oblong Industries, a design studio say

"We're a digital species now—nothing short of apocalypse will change that! The health of our digital society lies, therefore, in the broadest possible distribution of agency. Agency is circumscribed mainly by the UI—the machinery through which human intent is transduced into the machine. So designing and deploying radically more capable UIs is one of the most important things we can do today.”

So, enjoy your Fiori and other enterprise UX for now but quickly prepare for many waves of gestural, voice, haptic, scanner, machine learning influenced UX in the next few years.

It will be the extension of the Sunday night/Monday morning phenomenon. What users expect at work should not trail what they are already seeing in their cars and in their homes.  Or at the movies.