There’s a theory called ‘The Uncanny Valley’ regarding humans’ emotional response to human-like robots. From The Wikipedia entry:
The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 […]
Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes strongly repulsive. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being’s, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.
This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.
While most of us don’t interact with human-like robots frequently enough to accept or reject this theory, many of us have seen a movie like The Polar Express or Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, which use realistic – as opposed to cartoonish – computer-generated human characters. Although the filmmakers take great care to make the characters’ expressions and movements replicate those of real human actors, many viewers find these almost-but-not-quite-human characters to be unsettling or even creepy.
The problem is that our minds have a model of how humans should behave and the pseudo-humans, whether robotic or computer-generated images, don’t quite fit this model, producing a sense of unease – in other words, we know that something’s not right – even if we can’t precisely articulate what’s wrong.
Why don’t we feel a similar sense of unease when we watch a cartoon like The Simpsons, where the characters are even further away from our concept of humanness? Because in the cartoon environment, we accept that the characters are not really human at all – they’re cartoon characters and are self-consistent within their animated environment. Conversely, it would be jarring if a real human entered the frame and interacted with the Simpsons, because eighteen years of Simspons cartoons and eighty years of cartoons in general have conditioned us not to expect this [Footnote 1].
There’s a lesson here for software designers, and one that I’ve talked about recently – we must ensure that we design our applications to remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application.
Obvious, you say? I’d agree that software designers and developers generally observe this rule except in the midst of a technological paradigm shift. During periods of rapid innovation and exploration, it’s tempting and more acceptable to violate the expectations of a particular environment. I know this is a sweeping and abstract claim, so let me back it up with a few examples.
Does anyone remember Active Desktop? When Bill Gates realized that the web was a big deal, he directed all of Microsoft to web-enable all Microsoft software products. Active Desktop was a feature that made the Windows desktop look like a web page and allowed users to initiate the default action on a file or folder via a hyperlink-like single-click rather than the traditional double-click. One of the problems with Active Desktop was that it broke all of users expectations about interacting with files and folders. Changing from the double-click to single-click model subtley changed other interactions, like drag and drop, select, and rename. The only reason I remember this feature is because so many non-technical friends at Penn State asked me to help them turn it off.
Another game-changing technology of the 1990s was the Java platform. Java’s attraction was that the language’s syntax looked and felt a lot like C and C++ (which many programmers knew) but it was (in theory) ‘write once, run anywhere’ – in other words, multiplatform. Although Java took hold on the server-side, it never took off on the desktop as many predicted it would. Why didn’t it take off on the desktop? My own experience with using Java GUI apps of the late 1990s was that they were slow and they looked and behaved weirdly vs. standard Windows (or Mac or Linux) applications. That’s because they weren’t true Windows/Mac/Linux apps. They were Java Swing apps which emulated Windows/Mac/Linux apps. Despite the herculean efforts of the Swing designers and implementers, they couldn’t escape the Uncanny Valley of emulated user interfaces.
Eclipse and SWT took a different approach to Java-based desktop apps [Footnote 2]. Rather than emulating native desktop widgets, SWT favor direct delegation to native desktop widgets [Footnote 3], resulting in applications that look like Windows/Mac/Linux applications rather than Java Swing applications. The downside of this design decision is that SWT widget developers must manually port a new widget to each supported desktop environment. This development-time and maintenance pain point only serves to emphasize how important the Eclipse/SWT designers judged native look and feel to be.
Just like Windows/Mac/Linux apps have a native look and feel, so too do browser-based applications. The native widgets of the web are the standard HTML elements – hyperlinks, tables, buttons, text inputs, select boxes, and colored spans and divs. We’ve had the tools to create richer web applications ever since pre-standards DOMs and Javascript 1.0, but it’s only been the combination of DOM (semi-)standardization, XHR de-facto standardization, emerging libraries, and exemplary next-gen apps like Google Suggest and Gmail that have led to a non-trivial segment of the software community to attempt richer web UIs which I believe we’re now lumping under the banner of ‘Ajax’ (or is it ‘RIA’?). Like the web and Java before it, the availability of Ajax technology is causing some developers to diverge from the native look and feel of the web in favor of a user interface style I call “desktop app in a web browser”. For an example of this style of Ajax app, take a few minutes and view this Flash demo of the Zimbra collaboration suite.
To me, Zimbra doesn’t in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook [Footnote 4]. On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel (screenshots). Do I prefer the Gmail look and feel over the Zimbra look and feel? Yes. Why? Because over the past twelve years, my mind has developed a very specific model of how a web application should look and feel, and because Gmail aligns to this model, I can immediately use it and it feels natural to me. Gmail uses Ajax to accelerate common operations (e.g. email address auto-complete) and to enable data transfer sans jarring page refresh (e.g. refresh Inbox contents) but its core look and feel remains very similar to that of a traditional web page. In my view, this is not a shortcoming; it’s a smart design decision.
So I’d recommend that if you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design and recognize that when you build a “desktop in the web browser”-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption. The fact that you can create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you should; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.
[Footnote 1] Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a notable exception.
[Footnote 2] I work for the IBM group (Eclipse/Jazz) that created SWT, so I may be biased.
[Footnote 3] Though SWT favors delegation to native platform widgets, it sometimes uses emulated widgets if the particular platform doesn’t provide an acceptable native widget. This helps it get around the ‘least-common denominator’ problem of AWT.
[Footnote 4] I’m being a bit unfair to Zimbra here because there’s a scenario where its Outlook-like L&F really shines. If I were a CIO looking to migrate off of Exchange/Outlook to a cheaper multiplatform alternative, Zimbra would be very attractive because since Zimbra is functionally consistent with Outlook, I’d expect that Outlook users could transition to Zimbra fairly quickly.
“While most of us don’t interact with human-like robots frequently enough to accept or reject this theory”
And I would have to reply that you haven’t worked for some of the people that I have worked for. 😉
There is a deeper under-current here than just application to software development. As human beings (prior exceptions noted), we’re hard wired to pick up on difference(s). At a minimum, it’s a survival instinct. It can also come into play as part of a coping mechanism, as well as a tool in learning.
Even without all of modern day distractions, the ability to focus on what’s different allows us to differentiate important signal (new) from mundane signal (already experienced). It allows us to focus our energy on things that will have better returns or more severe consequences.
We can use that ability to accelerate our learning as well. If we find the differences between a model that we already know and a new one, we can shorten our learning curve based upon the similarities. At the same time, we can also screw things up by comparing dissimilar systems.
One of the things my karate instructor(s) have taught me is to notice when I’m feeling most uncomfortable while working new material as that highlights when I’m at a maximal learning point. Conversely, as software developers, we can recognize this point during user testing and make a cost to benefit analysis.
The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design…
Bill Higgins has penned a thoughtful meditation on web design entitled The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design. (For those who don’t know it, the uncanny valley is a concept from robotics that posits that there is a point where……
Thank you! Finally an explanation for why I hate using the ATM on the corner that has changed its “YES” answer to “Sure” and “No” to “Nah” (or something like that). The whole interface is now changed to read like a relaxed verbal conversation between people and it is annoying (I don’t talk that way to the human teller) and yes, uncanny. Give me back the YES button please!
[…] Higgins looks at the Uncanny Valley of UI design. The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about human response to an almost-human robot. Bill tries to […]
[…] Bill Higgins takes a very unusual way of explaining why Mac apps should look like Mac apps and Windows apps should look like Windows apps. It also explains […]
I find it funny that someone with most of their above the fold space taken up by useless space is making profound comments on UI design.
“above the fold”?
WHAT fold? I expect to scroll web pages. And most users are happy to, if you still believe that to be untrue you may need to update your thinking QBrain.
I found Polar Express trailers creepy enough to not watch the movie, and you nail why I don’t “like” Java apps. None of this is revolutionary of course but it’s good to see it summarised and simplified. Cheers.
If the design challenge is to create experiences that meet the expected model of users then where is the room for innovation in design? Where is the room for innovations like the iPod interface? Using the circle navigation was a clear break in interacting with portable music devices, but users adapted. By this argument all new portable music devices should use some near variant on the iPod interface. Perhaps there is a better interface? Perhaps there is room for significant improvement? These improvements of course have to be implemented in a way that extend user’s expectation models in palatable steps, but we have to maintain the option to extend user’s models…right??
@QBrain
> I find it funny that someone with most of their above the fold
> space taken up by useless space is making profound comments on
> UI design.
Glad I could amuse you 🙂
@Tungsten
> If the design challenge is to create experiences that meet the
> expected model of users then where is the room for innovation
> in design?
Thanks much for your thoughtful comment. I don’t think that your post and my post are in disagreement.
My point was not anti-innovation, it was anti-emulation. The iPod did not try to emulate a jukebox or a software media player; it provided an optimized interface that suited its purpose – selecting and playing music on a pocket-size device.
[…] stand the gmail interface. Tim O’Reilly’s post reflecting on Bill Higgins post the Uncanny Valley of user interface design made me groan. Higgins talks about why gmail is better then zimbra – an up and coming open […]
[…] an excellent article by Bill Higgins on the parallels between creepy 3D-rendered actors and some user interfaces. Raises some interesting points about usability, but from a different […]
Very interesting. I never quite understood my negative reaction to polar express before (given that other animations rarely bother me).
[…] Higgins brings up quite a few interesting points in his article, “the Uncanny Valley of user interface design.” Read it before you read this. Essentially he’s saying that there is a “sweet […]
“Though SWT favors delegation to native platform widgets, it sometimes uses emulated widgets if the particular platform doesn’t provide an acceptable native widget. This helps it get around the ‘least-common denominator’ problem of AWT.”
Basically SWT faces the same issue as AWT, and is extending with a set of lightweight components. Exactly what was invented ages ago with Swing. We come full circle.
Does iTunes look like a native Windows app? How about Windows Media Player? How about the WPF apps being promoted by Microsoft? Flex apps?
[…] Bill Higgin’s “the Uncanny Valley of user interface design” discusses why Windows apps should look like Windows and web apps should look like the web. Unfortunately he shuffles the fact that the web app Zimbra intends to replace Outlook into a footnote. He is right that it makes an odd looking web app and I do find our company’s SAP jarring because it’s web based and used to look like a crappy Windows app. I think it’s interesting that the new Netscape browser’s Netstripe theme pulls it in line with current web apps even though it is a web browser. It gives a much stronger mental connection with the content than Firefox’s random bits of color. As a long time Linux user I grew used to inconsistent interface. It didn’t matter to me what it looked like as long as it worked. […]
It is interesting that no one has sort to question the validity of the uncanny valley theory even though, given the current state of robotic developments it can be no more than an intuitive guess at the way people WOULD react if such sophisticated robots DID exist. My own observations are likewise speculative and intuitive.
I think there may be something more behind the vague discomfort which one feels when watching an animatronic human or interacting with a hybridised interface. Psychological studies have shown that an acute sensitivity to deceit is deeply engrained into our natures. Faces and interfaces which set out to resemble one thing and turn out to be something else leave us feeling deceived and the negativity of our response is apt to increase if the deception was initially successful.
Interestingly, this deceit -> dislike circuit does not have to be triggered. In fact, far more positive emotional responses can be engendered by things such as cuddly toys or the animated creations of Nick Park, where the objects do not look remotely human, but are treated as human anyway because of key aspects of their appearance or behaviour. This suggest that the interfaces which will succeed best are not the ones which slavishly copy existing paradigms but which identify those factors which make users feel comfortable and deliver them in a coherent and consistent way.
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I totally agree with your example on Gmail vs. Zimbra and I’m glad that this is a common view. Creativity within a standard user interface works best.
I won’t take time to discuss the validity of the uncanny valley because I feel The
Simpsons example above kinda anticipated what Jeremy Minton pointed out. The universe created is the important one and things that break it and link to other universes create the Uncanny Valley.
However theres one thing that, while reading the article, actually triggered an Uncanny Valley effect for me and that is the conclusion in your last paragraph.
“.. when you build a “desktop in the web browserâ€-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave.”
my objection to this first extract is that as other pointed out evolution and innovation work hand in hand. Examples from iPod have already been given, but i’d like to use a more closely related one and that is Flash & Flex. When I first set my eyes on a flash enabled site I was amazed and started playing around with it to see what it can do. Why it did not violate any of my previously conceptions of the web interface is that it was completly new. There were no links to other universes to create an Uncanny Valley effect. Later on as people and designers got hold of flash and it evolved, it always amazed me how new and highly interactive interfaces could be offered on the web and not once I experienced a feeling of discomfort, even in high values learning curves of some sofisticated designs. However I felt a small feeling of discomfort when i played my first downloaded flash game on my desktop as I felt it belonged to the web. So real world interactions and 3D controls where brought in the web universe and it felt they belonged there even though this was a new technology and the web till then was all blue links & low graphics to meet speed requirements. Faster computers and broadband connections gave flash his share of the market and made it a integrated part of the Web universe. so in conclusion I think innovative ideeas have it easy.
The problem with RIA is that they don’t bring a new universe they allow elements from desktop to breach to web. So than my next point I disagree is:
” .. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption.”
Why negative ? the way I see things flash showed the people that there are new ways of developing UI and opened their eyes. I feel the same about RIA/ Ajax. I don’t think
that simply using RIA gives nagative effects. Its using it to port old UI from the desktop that is the problem. As animated universes are a success when they can port the things that make a squirel humain, the same might apply to Desktop features porting. I think the Uncanny Valley effect occurs when we port just the Look & Feel of the Desktop app and we miss out on the things that the original app was meant to solve.
So I agree that:
“The fact that you can create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you should; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.”
but not in the warning sense of your conclusion. More in the sense that this new approach might open the door to a completely new way we develop wep apps. More of my friends rely on web and web apps than on desktop counterparts. Most of the projects I work on use distributed ( desktop, server, mobile) environments and this shifts the wheight of the services and stored data I use from the old desktop to a new distributed & always available & always interactive form. I no longer care about my hdd storage space or abot writing cd’s and dvd’s, now I care about my server quota & online services that allow me to interact with data stored there.
So maybe active desktop failure occured just because it copied the form not the real features of the web, because to be frank I would love to have a Desktop that is so web-enabled and makes the bluetooth links and sever storage & services and etc…… merge togheter in a choesive and transparent manner. One that keeps track for me of important distributed data like this blog comment.
I hope my post won’t exceed your quota :))
This theory implies the only entities that can innovate are the market leader. As these market leaders do push the envelope from time to time; Microsoft Tab bar for office 2007, hailstorm, widgets, Apple the IPOD, the dock, final cut pro, etc..
I would argue the majority of innovation happens in education, by artist or startups.
A quick thank you for the many thoughtful posts above – great insights and criticisms.
All very interesting points. The engineering of UI is straightforward, even if complex.
As the brain optimizes its memory of an event, it establishes common patterns of all senses and dimensions. We know, for instance, that the “close window” button in Windows is in the upper right corner. When we encounter something that doesn’t fit the pattern, our brain must kick into overdrive. The more emotionally involved the pattern (say, human action), the greater our emotional response as we encounter unexpected behaviors, supporting the Uncanny Valley hypothesis. In designing UI, one must be very careful where we breach the user’s expectations. It doesn’t mean you can’t differ from the norm, but when you do, you are asking the user to expend effort. If the user accepts, all is ok. If the user balks, frustration (or anxiety) sets in. And to complicate matters immensely, everybody optimizes patterns differently. So what works for 60% of a population doesn’t work for the rest. Makes life interesting (and often frustrating).
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The Uncanny Peak of Wrong Metaphors…
Last week, Tim O’Reilly wrote about a Bill Higgins post called "The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design."
The metaphor Higgins brings to the table to help explicate his point is that of "The Uncanny Valley," which Higgins…
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I don’t think its the uncanny valley but to a broader issue of making sure that users expectations are met by providing the right context. I’ve blogged a bit about this at the Lightspeed blog with examples of how this can go wrong when context isn’t set properly, ranging from virtuoso violinists as subway buskers to Topix.net new redesign. Click on my name in this comment if you’re interested to read more.
Your theory about Uncanny Valley can not hold much for user interface design.
Why do you feel odd to an almost-but-not-quite-human robot? This is because you somebody has told you beforehand that this object is robot, not human. Therefore, no matter how resemble it looks like human, you have some uneasy feeling with it. This is sychological phenomenon. I believe, if somebody leads a real human to you and tell he is in fact a robot, you will feel more and more uneasy with this guy. And from the moment you are told that he is robot, you’ll feel more and more odd with this poor guy. Uncanny Valley exists!
For the same reason, if a swing application is running using Windows Look And Feel using java 6, and if you tell the end users that the application is developed with C++ on MFC, or simply don’t tell him anything about your technology, he is surely not aware it is swing application.
Most of the end users don’t know what is Swing application and what is SWT application. They simply uses these application. Only java developers are aware of this distinction. Even with java developers, if you dont’ tell him it is a Swing application, he is probably not aware the so-called “Uncanny Valley” in it.
In another direction, aren’t native widegts emulated? Of course they are drawn in C/C++ or ASM. But they are not “native” as you think.
So your anology of Uncanny Valley doesn’t convince me at all.
Sorry, I am not native English speaker. But I think you should understand my reason.
In a word, human beings are very likely to be influenced by the beforehand message, no matter it is in fact inaccurate. Uncanny Valley is sychological phenomenon.
@WilliamChen
> Sorry, I am not native English speaker. But I think
> you should understand my reason.
No worries about not being a native English speaker – I appreciate the points you made in your comment, even if I do not agree with all of them. Thanks for taking the time to post.
Great read! One of my pet peevs is that web designers/programmers often re-invent the wheel rather than choosing to think about what might be expected by the user. A great example is the placement of common things like ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, ‘help’ etc. Most computer users expect to see ‘help’ on the right of the top menu bar. Without common standards of interface design, particularly for business/ecommerce sites, extraordinary amounts of time are wasted trying to find the simplest of things. Take three random ecommerce sites. Now try to find the address of the business behind that site. They are almost certainly in different places on each site.
Desktop apps took a great leap forward when a common UI was adpoted on each platform. When ‘file’, ‘edit’, ‘view’ and ‘help’ are in an expected place, then time spent in learning what the app does is a helluva sight more productive.
It would be great to have a common UI for web apps…
Surely software should be developed to provide a consistent application interface regardless of the transport, i.e. regardless of whether it is installed on the user’s machine or accessed via the web? Do most non-techie people think about whether the application is a desktop-based app or a web app? I think the functionality of the software is important first.
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Really great article. Thanks!
The problem with the movement of everything to web, is that once you reach a place (i.e. different continent) where your expectations around internet connectivity isn’t met.
For example, expensive, slow. It can occur that your frequently used web application become available and also your so-called stored content. That’s why I am looking forward to application which can merge mobile/desktop application with the web application. That you really have your content available everywhere you go!
I can tell you that I can’t use some content, because of limitations on the internet connection which makes it really expensive to use the content created earlier. I know have to pay per megabyte of international traffic, I can tell you that music and/or documents stored on my webserver in Germany is nearly inaccessible now.
[…] billhiggins.us: If you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the […]
10/10 and well written too. User’s expectations are always complicated and often unwritten. I’m curious to see how the UI in the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project will pan out. While it is optimised for young’uns, it isn’t what is currently called “a computer”. having said that, given enough time, all walls break down, and the barrier between ‘desktop apps’ and ‘web apps’ will, I think, be transparent within 5 years.
Apple’s has some guidleines about dashboard widget design. Most of those rules can be applied to a web application.
It is a good aproach if you want to have more freedom for your design and still maintain a look-and-feel not so different from their native ui experience.
(General Disclaimer: These are my own words, thoughts and opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. I work for Yahoo!)
I agree that “blurring the lines” on the web, trying to make web things look and behave like something that should be running on your desktop, can be a slippery slope (notwithstanding being challenging, exciting and fun to work on at the same time.)
I worked on the redesign of Yahoo! Photos in 2006 as a web developer implementing a lot of the core UI features and interactions. We ran very quickly into the issue of blurring web/desktop behaviours, because we decided to use a selection model that included drag and drop interactions.
A lot of this was fun – for example, in customizing the experience to the OS. The selection marquee (clicking and dragging around photo thumbnails) would appear semi-transparent blue on Windows, and grey on Mac OS X, giving it a more native feel. At the same time, this may have further reinforced the downside to user assumptions about other features of the UI which may not have been implemented.
Because of the decision to use “DnD” in particular, we opened a sort of pandora’s box of interaction challenges. Complexity and features increased in order to keep the experience consistent with what would be expected from a desktop model, because we chose to use one particular feature commonly associated with that model.
Someone else commented (perhaps on a related blog on this subject), that users would see a partial desktop model on the web and would automatically assume other behaviours (right-click/context menus, and so on.) We saw this behaviour as well. Users would see DnD implemented, and would automatically assume they could use other desktop-like interactions. Shift+click for selection models, keyboard shortcuts like CTRL-A, dragging files into the browser from the desktop to upload, right-click for context menus on specific elements, that sort of thing. (We implemented these for the most part on the new Photos, too!) .. What I learned from this is that if you’re going to decide to go with a selection model or drag and drop but not use other desktop interactions, consider that users may be confused as they make assumptions and try to perform actions which you may not have implemented.
Alongside this whole issue is performance and consistency, given browser differences and so on. As the browser was originally designed (correct me if I’m mistaken,) as a document viewer, it’s safe to say they’re overloaded and close to bursting at the seams with all of the client-side tricks developers are pulling in order to make them behave how we’d like. While there are some amazing examples of web development feats out there – Yahoo! Mail, Google Maps and so on – it’s still quite a difficult and rather painful process to get to that level of functionality at this point.
Despite the challenges, I still think it’s a fun and exciting time to be doing web development, and building pretty nifty UI things based on web standards and maintaining some semantic informational value to the “applications” we’re trying to build these days.
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With thinking like this, we’re all condemned to a world of ho-hum. Break-out designs that work better than anything before are usually different. Just following the trend for the sake of doing so is inane. Mediocrity for the sake of consistency is silly.
Desktop JAVA apps suck because they are UGLY. Not because of any weird meta-brain process.
Single-clicking the UI in Windows, IMO, is the single best feature ever implemented (well, maybe not, but it certainly added YEARS to the life of my wrist). I was so happy that feature was added. I hate double-clicking.
The real design principle one should follow, with regard to web-development is to implement a UI that resembles the functionality of the application. If it *IS* an application, use a functional UI. If the thing is merely a website, implement a navigational UI. Shoe-horning a functional application into a traditional navigational “web” UI, IMO, makes it more difficult for the user to use the resulting application.
Good design is good design, regardless of the enivornment. Learned behaviors can be unlearned and SHOULD be unlearned if they are inherintly innefficient. I’m no fanboy of Jeff Raskin (IMO, a lot of what he says in his book, “The Humane Interface” is not practical), but a read of that book will certainly open ones eyes to the possiblities of what one can and should (or not) do with a UI, regardless of the enviornment in which it sits.
I also find it ironic that comments about UI can be found here considering the layout of this page (I had to maximize my window on a 1280×1024 display to be able to get the text column to be more than an inch or two wide). Why is there so much whitespace between the nav panel and the text column!?
In summation: I do not agree, and applying the Uncanny Valley “theory” to UI design is suspect, at best, and completely irrelevant at worst.
So if I understand you correctly, the mistake Swing made was in attempting to emulate the native look and feels, but not getting it perfect. If Swing had done something completely different, but pretty, or had emulated the native look and feel perfectly, all would have been fine.
I think that’s the problem I had with Swing — that the Metal and Ocean themes are unattractive, and the native emulation is very close, but not perfect (smack in the middle of the Uncanny Valley). An update to Java 6 will give us Nimbus, which I hope is a beautiful new alternative that solves the problem you identified.
Great observations.
I made a somewhat related observation on my blog a few weeks back (I called it “web vision”). What I observed was how we humans tend to gain robotic traits when interacting with UIs over time. We automate our responses to UIs and tend to zoom in on areas which we know will give us the maximum rewards, ignoring everything else. For example, I have Yahoo as my home page – I always look at the news headlines and nothing else. This has to be somewhat troublesome to the Ad industry which assumes we will take in the full landscape 🙂
@Robert Barth
> With thinking like this, we’re all condemned to a world of
> ho-hum.
First off, thanks for taking the time to comment.
As I mentioned in comment 10, my point is anti-emulation, not anti-innovation.
> I also find it ironic that comments about UI can be found
> here considering the layout of this page (I had to maximize
> my window on a 1280×1024 display to be able to get the
> text column to be more than an inch or two wide).
I have some older family members who aren’t that tech savvy and it’s easier for me to make my WordPress theme’s font bigger rather than explain to each of them how to scale up their browser’s font (see also this post).
Sorry for the inconvenience this caused you.
[…] Bill Higgins has a very, very thought provoking post about the “uncanny valley” and the sudden increase in trying to make web applications look like desktop applications. In the “uncanny valley” he is referring to the theory that the more human like our robots become, the more we’re impressed until they reach the point where they are human enough to be creepy, but still not human enough to put us at ease. In his post, he contrasts Ajax applications and web applications. […]
[…] Bill Higgins :: the Uncanny Valley of user interface design A very good post on why to make web apps look like web apps and not just recreate desktop apps look and feel. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while and totally agree! (tags: design ui usability interface ajax webdesign web robots uncannyvalley) […]