Many of the user interfaces that I come across on the various mobile devices that I interact with are not all that neat. Let me correct that. They were novel and neat when I first acquired the device or application. But, that quikcly got old and stale – especially in those applications that I interacted with the most. What would be neat in many of those cases is the interface adapting to my increased usage and then changing to either expose more of itself, or trimming to only exposing the features that I use the most.

I’ve taken to calling it adaptive intelligence or an adaptive interface. Basically that as I spend time in the application or program, that it adapts to my greater comfort with some features, and recommends or trims what I see based on what is learned about my usage. This was some of what when into my UI design for All Books – as you went into a book/chapter, the book name/chapter number would “age,” dimming itself compared to what you haven’t read as much. In time, you could see what areas of the Bible it was that you didn’t read much easier than you could get to the parts you did read more often.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines, but I do think that its something that we can do a good bit more of in this space of faith-based content. It seems like a new UI idea, and even has been proposed as much in an article at FastCo Design:

…In 1975, the Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined his theory of “flow” in his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined the concept as ‘‘the holistic experience that people feel when they act with total involvement.’’ When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, narrowing their awareness to the activity itself, losing self-consciousness, and feeling in control of their environment. Flow is also proven to have a positive impact on learning. In skiing, novice practitioners are advised to spend the first few days at the green beginner slopes to get the best learning experience. On the other hand, experienced skiers will find themselves bored at the beginner slopes and must seek their optimal experience on the black expert slopes. This individual balance between skill and challenge is, according to Csikszentmihalyi, called the “flow zone” and staying in this flow zone is the best possible way to learn and make progress while still feeling constantly challenged and intrinsically motivated.

While flow has been extensively applied in studying a broad range of contexts, such as sports, shopping, rock climbing, dancing and others, I believe that, by drawing inspiration from video games, flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products…

It takes a lot of foresight to make an interface like this. Similar to the classic “choose your own adventure” books, the application author has to be content with designing many paths to a solution, and doing so in a way that doesn’t break up the story. What would a bible look like if it adapted to our reading tendencies? Or better, what about a Bible app that started off doing simple search and reading, then evolved to something like a full-blown study/sermon companion like Logos/Olive Tree’s products? Would be kind of neat IMO.