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10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn't matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don't manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.

And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn't mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it's necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.

Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.

You may also want to take a look at the related posts:

• User Experience In The Future
• 15 Stunning Cutting-Edge Gadgets and Technologies

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10 Beautiful Things For A Beautiful Life

With this post we start to publish finalists of our guest author contest. Over three weeks 12 winning articles will be published — selected top-10-lists and discussion articles. To rate the articles we'll analyze popularity, users activity, quality of backlinks, traffic etc. You can follow our updates on Twitter — feel free to share your comments, suggestions and remarks.

We are using a lot of beautiful things every day. Once we understand how beautiful they are, the life is becoming better and more interesting... and when not... well, then they still make our life more interesting! There are some truly beautiful things to make our life a little bit more unusual and vivid. Most of them are ordinarily but they can make our life and the life of people around us a little bit more spectacular. The question is: do we need these things? – Of course we do!

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(Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers

Desktop wallpapers always come in handy. The more inspirational, beautiful and elegant they are, the better they can challenge our imagination and provide some fresh perspective in a rather tedious and monotonous workflow. However, desktop wallpapers sometimes can go far beyond offering colorful eye-candy; sometimes desktop wallpapers include calendars, funny cartoons and logos of favourite tools, services and companies. The latter is particularly true for Apple-fans and Microsoft-haters as well as for Google, Twitter and Firefox-users.

In this post we present stunning desktop wallpapers related to typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes. Among other things we review calendar wallpapers, minimalistic wallpapers, wallpapers-illustrations and themes for Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and Google-fans. Each of the links leads to huge wallpapers archives where you can find even more excellent wallpapers. All screenshots are clickable and lead to the pages where they can be downloaded.

Please notice that you might want to take a look at the posts

• Selected Wallpapers For Your Desktop which covers wallpapers, devkits, Flickr pools, Widescreen and HD-monsters and even wallpapers-related social communities and wallpapers for gamers,
• More Creative and Beautiful Wallpapers which covers fresh, original and creative wallpapers and
• Selected Wallpapers: For Desktop & Web-Design which covers web design-related wallpapers and has dozens of references for Mac-fans.

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15 Stunning Cutting-Edge Gadgets and Technologies

We live in a spectacular time. The pace of technology steadily increases, new fields of science are heavily explored and innovative concepts emerge almost every day, resulting in stunning and overwhelming products. The impact of these products can be tremendous: in fact, new technology can completely revolutionize the way we play, communicate, work and live our lives. Some of these products are just eye-candy, some are useful, some are visionary and some may become revolutionary in the next years.

In this post we present 15 stunning examples of cutting edge technology which is already reality today or will become reality in 2008. Please notice that some videos might not provide you with a concrete idea of what the technology offers, e.g. it's impossible to display the advantages of 3D-TV using videos produced by a 2D-video-camera.

You might want to take a look at the articles

• User Experience Of The Future which covers innovative developments in field of user interface design and
• Innovative Designs and Devices which covers stunning design concepts and ideas which can become reality in the future.

You have more examples? Comment on this article!

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User Experience Of The Future

Over decades we've used to adapt our habits, behavior and mindset to technology. We've improved our productivity by using tools and devices designed especially for the tasks we have to deal with regularly. But we've also constrained our abilities to the features of the very tools and devices we've become dependant on.

We've got used to a number of things. To traditional mouse-keyboard user interaction, to 2D windows-based user interface and to a rather unspectacular user's workflow which enables one user interact with only one application at a time. For instance, while you're browsing in your web browser you can't scale your text and resize your window simultaneously — unless you are a keyboard-shortcut-master.

Good news: it can be different. Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques seem very futuristic, and are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.

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