Japanese UI designers rock

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Why is it that I’m not surprised that the forefront of user interface design is Japan? My buddy Brian is in Toyko now, and took a video tour through one of the famous gadget/cell phone stores in Akiba.

I love that Japanese phones have cool, power-user interfaces–exactly the kind of thing I’d like on my PC. Right now, there are essentially two UI options for computers: universal newb-friendly UI and crazy, complex Unix-style UI. OS X and Windows fall into the newb-friendly category, while most types of Unix and many Linux variants are much too complex for a normal user.

Microsoft tried something similar to this in the past, you probably remember the punchline that was Bob. Designed to be a newbie front-end for Windows 3.1, Bob was unusable for most people because it didn’t expose necessary functionality. Worse, it condescended to adults who found Windows too complex. Essentially, Bob said “Hey, it’s not that I’m too difficult for you to figure out, you’re just too stupid, moron.” It was a complete failure in every way.

That said, I think that if a vendor rolled the other way, by adding cool and useful power-user functionality to the existing UI, without sacrificing performance (like you do with the Desktop UI replacement apps for Windows XP), it could be successful. Maybe that’s just me though.