Revisiting Marcus’s 1993 Paper and Reflecting on Evolution

In the year 1993, Aaron Marcus, well known graphical user interface designer, published a paper “Human communication issues in advanced UIs”. In that paper he emphasizes on the importance of developing sophisticated UIs, in order to increase the usability of products with advanced functionality. The interaction of these devices with users will primarily depend upon the design of UIs. One important aspect of this ‘Human Computer Interaction’ is the visual communication that is happening between user and UIs. The objective of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of visual communication of the device ‘itouch/iphone’ using elements mentioned in the original paper. This paper will examine impact of the design elements stated by Marcus, on the design of UIs and whether these elements are still viable after 14 years. While analyzing, this paper will also try to study new techniques and technology that are used to overcome the challenges in design of UI for mobile devices. This paper will also discuss the issue of effect of cultural diversity in the development of advanced UIs and usability of overall product