Some technology simply surprises and delights. I’ve posted about the web applications developed by 37signals before – their products give you what you need and nothing more. You never feel like you’re fighting the interface to make it work for you.
Quicksilver is another one. At first glance, Quicksilver simply lets you find applications and data on your computer or in the cloud. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognise which items you are searching for based on previous experience.
More than that, having found what you want, Quicksilver lets you choose what to do with it – email it, copy it, move it, launch it. You can send instant messages, dial a phone number, look up words in a dictionary and queue up songs in iTunes party shuffle without having to open an application and wrangle with its interface. You can resolve a simple task and get back to what you were doing without interruption.
In this nerdy but inspired talk, Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff talks about ‘magic and delight’ in software interface design. I’ve tried Quicksilver (it’s only for Mac) and yep, it’s magic and delight all right. As the packaging says, the effort of frequent tasks fades into the background and you are able to act without thinking. These guys really know how users want to work.
So I’ve taken ‘magic and delight’ as a label for the things that surprise and delight me by providing the right answer, the right approach, making it just work, even introducing an air of mystery as to how it does it (I don’t need to know). I really hope the defining characteristic of the coming generation of tools – web 3.0 – helps us deal with the complexity of things by delivering a superior user experience and design.
image cc by Dan Dickinson
