Matias duarte is a user interface and industrial designer, his previous work in interface design has been the secret to the modern innovations of modern tech giants. Matias Duarte was always an ambitious and great industrial designer, early on in his career he won “Wired magazine’s Best Industrial designer” award, beating out apples iMac flat screen design team with a communications device that presented smartphone like features and a keyboard design that would be inspire many phone manufacturers during their early days. Arguably Duarte’s best work was the palm pre released in 2009. it featured an all new operating system that had to compete in a crowded market with Nokia’s Symbian, Blackberry’s BBMos Apple’s IOS and Google’s Android OS. Duarte’s design focused on the intuitiveness and the power of mobile multi tasking at a very early time. The palm pre was a smooth pebble shaped device that had a slide out keyboard, on its front it had only one scroll ball. The lack of hardware buttons on the design was to allow for a multitude of actions to be taken from the touch gestures on the device. These gestures went hand in hand with the new multitasking capability that WebOs could perform, the interface used a card system was novel and futuristic.
Updates to interfaces on modern devices have started to include alot more gesture based navigation with mobile devices. This is an update from hardware or software buttons that appeared on screens. This shift has occurred as our mobile phones become increasingly minimalist striping away unnecessary features in striving for the modernist ideal. Devices like the recent iPhone X and Google pixel 3 have no buttons in the front and rely on gestures that have been heavily inspired by duarte’s original designs in WebOs. The gestures he designed were centered around the powerful multitasking on the original. Only more recently we have seen operating systems and devices meet this demand of multi tasking different apps. Other modern design elements that we couldn’t imagine using our phones without us the navigation bar, it updated the user on certain events that happened on the devices. The navigation bar was another feature that allowed for more multitasking and quick switching between apps.
All these simple User interface elements have all been incorporated in the 2 major mobile operating systems in some way or another, the reason that modern operating systems like google’s android and apple’s ios look and have very similar user experiences is not from them copying each others design. It is because of their inspiration source, matias duarte’s WebOs.
Design Ideas 