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Reading about fiber optic Internet connections in the
recent tech edition of The New Yorker, I predict two
situations that’ll impact us in the world of interface
design using very high speed connections:

There will never be enough bandwidth to do what we
want. Even when we have virtual reality we’ll desire
enhanced reality.

We won’t be prepared to design for the challenges
of high speed connections. For example, right now we type our
search queries and click “Go”, the response of which
is a slight pause, then an icon
spinning/twirling/sparking in the upper right corner
of our browsers, then a search results page loads
little by little. This seems like sufficient feedback for the user. In the future we’ll click “Go” and
the results page will immediately appear. If the two
pages look alike, we may not even notice the page has
changed the response happened so quickly. We’ll have to be much more careful about
interaction design (what comes to mind in this case is using auditory interfaces to provide feedback. Not unlike on
Star Trek, where little beeps sound with each and every
press of a flat panel button.).