The only thing people care about apart from their health is time. All this constant advancement of human kind since its origin has been solely motivated to save our time and energy. So, the person or thing that can leverage most of our attention rules the world. The driving factor of technology involved in electronic product design is speed. Any product is measured in terms of how fast and how accurate it is, in its functionality. Technology today has forced us to look into things that matter by automating things that don’t. Half a decade ago people were hesitant to communicate via text messaging and today texting is the centre of the universe of communication. Technology is more powerful than people’s opinion. It changes opinions by proving options via internet. Internet is “options”.
Today, people are in a world of options. The only thing they get to do is choose. They chose only which attracts their attention in form or shape. Attention is, as always, the centre of the design universe. The only goal of any product or service is to squeeze maximum attention. Various companies involved in the design and manufacture of these products have been competing to pull their share out of the people’s attention space. This attention space is nothing but the human mind. The organizations who don’t understand this are out of the field. The organizations who understand this, trick the brain. They do this by building human centered products or services. It is only possible when they have complete understanding of the functionality of the brain. The ROI of building human centered products is uninvited attention.
This uninvited attention can only be possible literally, when people themselves are motivated to use a particular product or service. That is, they are forced to make a routine out of it. Gradually, these routines become a part of life and take the shape of habits. All human centered products are habit forming.
There are many habit forming products but a mobile is the epitome of design engineering. A mobile phone literally is a result of evolution of communication. It is because a mobile phone in today’s world, provides home to all habit forming products or services. By integrating all those services into itself, it has become our virtual self. The evolution of mobile phone is interesting because, it was first built to serve a single purpose. It is now used for anything and everything. So, the dream of every organization which is building applications on top of the mobile infrastructure today is to be a part of the home screen of a person’s mobile. The mobile phone has created an environment around us where, the knowledge a seven year old has around the information that he is interested in when he can’t properly read or write yet is fascinating.
When it comes to evolution of mobile device, it may happen in terms of applications and features which will be built on the mobile. Then this standard mobile infrastructure may be the foundation stone on which the rest of the technology is integrated. The prime criteria of any technology which was built or will be built in near future would be to save time. Any app on a mobile is built to reduce human effort by decreasing physical interaction. Today people even hate to pick up their phone and search for the needed information. It’s still friction.
In the contemporary world, companies are concerned how their business sounds like. Over the next decade or two, how a particular brand sounds like, would also be a variable for success. Google makes a lot of money with search. Search has already entered the voice space. All the next generation entrepreneurs have been able to dream, imagine and project, how big of a thing voice search is going to be. Voice search on a mobile device is going to create time. The reason podcasts have exploded in last half of a decade is because with technology we can passively listen to them and do something else. Texting and driving has killed a lot of people, but the voice technology creates a future environment people are not going to text and drive because the next decade would be talk and drive. In the next five years or so, every person is going to interact with an AI based speaker and do search queries and buy products. People are living through the biggest shift in the way which humans interact with each other since the invention of printing press.
