Humanizing Technology: From Raw Power to Intuitive Simplicity

Martin Duursma is the Chair of the Citrix CTO Office, which brings together the CTO of each Citrix product division as well as key technologists within the company to drive Citrix technology strategy and educate Citrix employees and stakeholders. He also serves as VP of the Citrix Advanced Products Group, which focuses on long-term applied research and prototyping. Duursma’s work involves both a deep understanding of the history and evolution of IT as well as a forward-looking perspective on the needs of users and enterprises. In this article, he shares his insights about the course of innovation in the years to come.

In years past, the IT industry tended to focus on technological challenges: making systems more powerful, faster, more efficient, and more versatile. More recently, in response to the economic downturn, the emphasis shifted to efficiency and cost savings. Now, as the economy is beginning to improve, companies are once again re-evaluating their thinking about IT, its role in the enterprise and the kinds of innovations most likely to drive real value.

When we take a step back and look not just at the tools we’re creating, but also at the way they’re used, the need for a new type of progress becomes clear: improving the human-machine interface. By finding better ways for people to integrate technology into their work and lives, we can help them get greater value from the tools we provide—and everything else flows from that: better productivity, new capabilities and a more effective business impact.

Machines that listen
Although few aspects of the human-machine interface are as taken for granted as the keyboard, typing remains laborious and non-intuitive. There is no natural correlation between speed of typing and speed of speech or thought, and users’ fluency is limited by their manual dexterity. While the solution—natural language interfaces—is obvious, widespread implementation and adoption has been slow to arrive, limited for the most part to voice commands for mobile phones, handheld devices, and car audio and navigation systems.

Thanks to rapidly increasing desktop power and a new generation of voice recognition algorithms, natural language could soon become a primary way that people do a broad range of things—not just giving commands, but putting words on paper, working with enterprise applications, surfing the web, working with digital media. Once the keyboard is out of the way, all manner of things become possible.

From mouse to multi-touch
Though a long-time mainstay of the PC era, the mouse remains an odd sort of tool, requiring the user to correlate the movement of a physical device beside the computer with the image on the screen. Touchpads are no less awkward to use.

Now, we’re finally starting to see real innovation in this area with the rapid rise of touch screens—first in Apple iPhones, then in a multi-touch version in Microsoft Windows 7, and inevitably in future Macs. This is a fundamentally more intuitive way to work: you simply point at the thing you’re interested in on the screen, then use your fingers in combination to manipulate it—just like in the offline world. This shift will help technology providers serve a broader population of users, help people accomplish tasks more easily, and make the computing experience more natural-feeling as a whole.

Mending fractured social connections
Think of how much of human communication is non-verbal: body language, facial expressions, physical reactions, eye contact. Think of how much more is serendipitous. The chance encounters and passing conversations of a day at the office enhance collaboration and create crucial opportunities to spark new ideas. On a deeper level, this kind of informal, unstructured contact strengthens interpersonal bonds, builds corporate culture and reaffirms the sense of a common purpose.

As distributed workforces become the norm, re-creating that personal face-time experience over distance becomes essential for nurturing the social skills needed for a successful workplace. Social networks are already gaining ground in the enterprise, as are blogs, Twitter, wikis and other channels that give people new ways to share information and connect. Now, we must build on these Web 2.0 technologies, along with other existing tools like presence detection and video communication, and take it all further to create a more vivid sense of your co-workers—as much as if you really were working in the same place.

Creating technology that works for people
Innovations like these will always have a significant technology component, but at this point, the really important breakthroughs will be conceptual: thinking more deeply about what people really need from technology, and how to make their tools more natural, intuitive and simpler to use. It’s no longer enough to say, “Here’s your new laptop—it’s twice as powerful as the old one!” Now we have to give people new ways of doing things, and new ways to interact with technology and with each other. As the iPhone has proved—when you get it right, people respond. In the years ahead, our challenge will be to take the raw power we’ve developed and find better ways for people to integrate it into their work and personal lives.

For more insights from Martin Duursma and the Citrix CTO Office, an expanded version of this topic is available on CIO magazine online.