Bridging the gap through appropriate interfaces between the digital abstraction and the real analog world is becoming an important design issue while digitalization enters more areas of life. The interface design requirements have many facets, such as, layout considerations within the chip, interface between chip and PCB, layout considerations within PCB, chip interface to a product, product interface to inputs/outputs beyond the box, box interface to the system, system interface to the network or a network of networks, and so on. The interfaces are required across enormously huge range, made complicated yet further by bandwidth spectrum. Interface challenges grow with bandwidth. The interface cost, complexity, and design time have become important and complex issues. Complexities increase with changes in product definition during the course of the project, which at times might require re-evaluating a large number of project-management activities.
EMPIRICAL SUGGESTIONS Designers use both design refinement as well as iterative design to cope up with new interface challenges. Design refinement is a planned move to design in phases, while iterative design is a series of design fault-finding and repairs. Experts offer some empirical suggestions to cope up with interface-related design problems: The designer must always bear in mind that however digital be the design, interface behaviors are analog and multiparametric. The properties of the connecting media and the inevitable presence of noise signals and other interference signals should never be lost sight of from the context of both transmission and reception. Always look out for signal source, line and client attributes for each interface, and also for pre- and post-signal conditioning techniques to correct deficiencies.
Distributed computing, rapidly increasing processor clock speeds, advent of multi-core processors, and complete systems on chips are among the developments that have made computing increasingly concerned with the efficient movement of data across the interconnects within a machine and beyond the machine into the ever-expanding network, making interface a challenging issue even beyond chip design. Network interface design is changing rapidly with the advent of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The raw recognition power of commercial recognizers has technologically enabled an extensive range of complex information, call management, and transaction services relying on ASR; however, before these could be commercially used by people, extensive work on dialog design and human factor “tuning” needs to be done. Recognizer capabilities greatly determine user-interface design. As of today there is no clear body of knowledge designers can bank upon while designing services relying on speech. But they are increasingly realizing the impact of network interface design on communication efficiency and cost, moving data and providing application isolation across communicating domains.
The most important factor in designing mobile devices interfaces is “context.” How an application is used and how the information is input are key issues of “context” that make designing for a mobile device world apart from chip or desktop design. Users of mobile devices have very specific needs and want to attain their goal in the easiest and fastest possible way. These challenges are becoming more severe with the user expectations rising from mobile. Some trends have emerged in mobile interface designs: feature sets are optimized to streamline common use cases; features are displayed progressively; and typography is used to show hierarchy and importance.
AMBIENT AS ALTERNATIVE Ambient interfaces have yet to emerge as a viable alternative to GUI and other conventional ones. Ambient interface uses the whole user environment for interaction between user and system, presenting digital information through subtle changes in the user’s physical environment such as variations of light, sound or movements. The subject is new and processes unsure. However, certain guidelines are emerging. Perhaps the most important is the participatory nature of the design—stimulation of users to contribute to ambient interface design at a very early stage. Experimental designs made without user participation had far lower success rate than those made with user participation.
