Web usability has long established a set of rules now. It’s not necessarily black and white, but it’s pretty obvious how a website should be designed and laid out for the best user experience, logo at the top, most likely to the left. Navigation either underneath is horizontally or in rare cases vertically to the left. The icon of a house should go back to the home page..etc
Mobile designs have also have it’s own set of runs. Even though Android is a bit different to iOS there’s still a unspoken set of rules for how a mobile site should look and how a mobile app should work. Partly these rules spawn from our experiences with using and designing websites. so it’s not a massive leap. Again these rules evolve slightly for the tablet generation with thanks to the Apple iPad. So no big surprises here and not much of a learning curve
However, there is one piece of technology that is just different enough to challenge various developers for a unified system. That is of course motion based gesture technology. For me, it all started with the Wii, which I loved. It was just so simple. Then the PlayStation Move and of course my favourite the XBox Kinect cam along. Which I think really changed the game around. A piece of technology that doesn’t require anything to be attached to the user! It’s amazing. I’ve bought a Xbox not long ago and have enjoyed myself, growing custom to how it interacts. but will this be the standard to gesture based technology? I guess one of the big question is how long would it take for Apple to bring out it’s own gesture based TV? I’m guessing within the next 18 months, so before Mid 2013. They are entering the market pretty slow, but as always with Apple (whom I’m not a fanatic to) not being the first doesn’t mean they can’t do it the best.
These are exciting times for usability and user experience designers. How can we design a system where it’s second nature for us to control something? Is the xbox methodology the way? maybe they got it right in Minority Report? or that super cool scene from Iron man 2?  Never before had a interaction method have so much data to help it grow and develop. Would the web be the same if we could track eye ball movement so easily all those decades ago?