The Next Computer Interface

BoarderPhreak was among the several readers who pointed out "an interesting article on the various alternatives to storing your files using a 'desktop' metaphor" at TechReview.com. "New styles like time-indexing, 3D sphere ala SGI's file manager, and even a 3D virtual 'task gallery' from Microsoft. Screenshots available in the article." All of these have been floating around for a while; hopefully soon some radically different interfaces will actually gain widespread acceptance.

Comments

3D, voice and why its NOT a good idea...

[MosesJones]

All of these gimmicks tend to miss out on the fact that a simple linear system is much better for _people_ than the fancy gimmicks which developers think are cool. Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.

3D is another dead end. IBM's Home project found that people would "lose" things in a 3D environment and in fact the visual cues of the 2D desktop were better suited to the task.

At the end of the day the mantra should be KISS. These break that mantra and add very little except cool graphics. It looks nice but doesn't function well. An everyday example of why simple is better are the icons used to denote things like "radiation", "poison" etc etc they don't actually represent the thing themselves but provide a simple shorthand for the thing. This simplification makes them much better at describing and classifying than attempting a "realistic" presentation.

Good examples of 2D simple interfaces are things like Google. Why would 3D make Google better ? It wouldn't.

Pretty != better. More Gimmicks != simpler

KISS

the thing is......

[Atrax]

.... the desktop/hierarchical structure thing isn't just a metaphor. people STILL USE in and out trays, filing cabinets, rolodexes, pen holders, noticeboards and so on. the desktop is one of two things :

a) a tried and tested system which works, and is already fairly* well established in the minds of billions of well-organised people, and was evolved over hundreds of years of trial and error by people who actually NEEDED to organise stuff
b) outmoded and ready for the trash heap.

take your pick.

I applaud the effort to find something better, but really, i think "natural selection" would have found a better real-world parallel if it existed.

relationships between files in the structure is a brilliant idea, but that's just metadata and cross-referencing.

- says the man with the cluttered desk - at least my machines don't have virtual beer bottles leaving ringmarks on my HTML documents.

*irony

Anyone Use VRML?

[vjmurphy]

Seems like the topic of VR/3D methods of information presentaion come up regularly. In Web land years back, we had people enamored of VRML: they wanted to use it as the primary navigation on an important site, and we pretty much nixed the idea as being too expensive, non-intuitive, and annoying to the user.

The major problem is that the computer is a 2D display device, so whenever moving to a 3D representaion, you are really getting a 2D representation of a 3D represenation of information, with only 2D tools to use to get at that info (i.e. mouse, keyboard).

I tried to use a 3D file manager for about a week, once, and found it unintuitive, silly, and a general pain to try to use. Why? Because I don;t want to wander through virtual galleries of items before finding the one I want: I've got a memory/filing system that makes it easier for the 2D computer system I use.

Unless the peripherals and OSes become 3D oriented, I don;t really see that changing. The desktop metaphor works for the type of information we store on our computers.

This is dumb.

[DarkZero]

These interfaces are neither revolutionary nor intuitive. They're counterintuitive and they're nothing but pretty graphics; fun experiments that will never and should never catch on. My desktop interface keeps everything organized the way I want it, instead of organizing it the way the computer wants it, and leaving me to search for files that the computer has moved around on its own.

These people should really learn that the desktop is the best way to handle a two dimensional computing environment. The only possible ways to make the current computer interface better is to either add new hardware to interact with the computer (3D goggles, hand sensors, microphone, what have you) or to tweak the current desktop interface to make it just a tiny bit better.

These people are trying to reinvent the wheel by making it a square or a triangle. My wheels are fine the way they are, thank you very much.

I dunno

[loraksus]

They claim that the desktop is dead etc, etc. I'm not so sure. Shit, I swear I saw a picture of MS Bob (enhanced) there, that was weird (the MS gallery interface). Anyone remember the hacked version of that called MS Bubba (trailer park motif, shotguns, malt liquor etc, funny as hell)?

Anyways, I think the problem is this. We all have a shitload of files - on my 100gb drive, I have 85,120 files taking up about 80GB. This is my "extra storage" drive, I got 45,920 files on my C drive. Ok, perhaps I'm extreme, I have a shitload (about 40,000) of text files, books in pdf, etc etc..
Now, how the hell are you going to make it easy for me, or anyone, to access a good 120,000 files, preferably within less than 5 user interactions (clicks, speaking something, etc..)
OK, a new gui, cool, but if it is going to succeed it will essentially be a sytem based on "Organisational units that hold things" i.e. Folders / directories / objects.

A Chronological system won't work for a situation like this, it'd take too much of a mental effort -answer this - what did you have for dinner 1 week ago? I think that would be a perfect question, because things on the computer tend to be "routine" - did I work on this or this? It doesn't take a psyc major to tell you that humans suck at remembering what happened in the past.

With a hierarchical structure, it is painfully easy, and it scales well.
i.e.
e:\asdf (ok, ok, its easy to type and a throw-back to my 286 days, wee didnt have no stinkeen gooey)
e:\asdf\music
e:\asdf\music\Rock
e:\asdf\music\Rock\Prodigy - minefields.mp3
Moreover you can actually communicate the location to someone else, not "a file from sometime last week", or "the file in the Blue gallery on the right wall in the clipboard". Ever try to explain over the phone how to get to your house? Ever get lost becuase the directions sucked?

I can't argue with the article too much though - clippy the annoying mother fucker gets bashed on :)

Imagine this...

[Marcus Brody]

...A logical, heirarchical, "tree" like structure. Accessed by small, simple but powerful commands. These commands can be chained and linked in an abritarily complex fashion. Allowing you to, for example, view all files in a convineint, time stamped fashion - exactly like scopeware. In fact, the flexibility and exstensibility of access to the system is limited purely by your own intelligence & imagination (pretty limited in my case then...). All people are both more intelligent, and more imaginitive than even the smartest computer. Therefore, untill this changes, I would prefer to hold the power in the organistation of my own computer.

Incidently, I am this }{ close to losing the GUI alltogethor. With the fantastic (but slightly unwiedly)mplayer, and Q3 now working from the CLI, I see little purpose (personally) for those quaint little GUIs.

A mouse is what you play Quake with.

User interfaces can only go so far...

[Ahchay]

Basically, the user interface really isn't that important. The main problem, as I see it, is that heirarchical data storage just doesn't work for most _people_.

This is especially obvious to anyone who's worked in teams of more than, ooh, one person who have had to share a single file structure. What one person perceives as a logical structure (/docs/reports/outgoing/date) another would view as being totally redundant (/docs/date/out/reports). You end up with a compromise that suits neither party, and by the time you move up to >100 people sharing a file structure you're in real trouble...

You also get into real trouble when a document has to exist in more than one place within the heirarchy. F'rinstance documents that need to be organised by Date or by Customer or by Author or by Cost code etc etc.

Shortcuts and/or logical links can help some of these problems, but they're both pretty messy solutions.

I have seen, and worked with, several database driven document management systems which show a lot of promise. Whether this is the way forward is a debatable point, certainly having to host a database complicates the implementation for the average desktop user.

Until some form of document management can be incorporated into the operating system all that a new GUI can do is to further obscure the core organisation.

What I want is a document management system which allows me to look at my files in the way that I choose, allows my co-workers to look at the same files in the way that they choose and hides the files completely from people who have no interest in them. The organisation of the files on disk shouldn't be something that I (as a user) have to even care about - slap them in a flat structure for all I care.

Fer [insert deity here] sake, if we were designing a file system from the ground up we wouldn't seriously contemplate a heirarchical model for more than five minutes. There must be a better way!

Cheers
Chris

Why?

[Junta]

All this research seems to want to throw away the desktop paradigm because it is just old, and computers can do so much more now. It seems less attention is given to how people use computers than what the computers can do. The current desktop paradigm is good, with virtual and multiple desktops, you can group information as you see fit. You don't need to use a clunky, harder to navigate 3D interface to do this same thing. The 3D paradigm has great benefit to games/simulation where you actually *want* to take the extra time to explore the environment. When you are just trying to get work done, 2D is much easier to see and wrap our heads around. Just like in real life, when we play, we do so in 3D, when working, we sit down at a desk and lay everything out in 2D. There is a reason why, for example, more people paint than work in plaster. As far as these other paradigms, they seem to be all about deciding for the user what the user wants to see and how he wants what he sees to be organized. This is a very bad mode of operation, people are intelligent enough to know what they do and do not want to see, and how to organize it. No matter what algorithm you use to guess what the user wants, it will never be 100% accurate, so just provide convenient access to everything, and be flexible enough to let the user modify it as he sees fit. Just because a concept is old, does not mean that it should be completely scrapped. This is a bad tendency that computer research people have, and they need to come to reality sometimes...

Re:The users control the interface.

[dakoda]

agreed, everyone has their own interface. but imagine how many problems will pop up when there is no longer a standard 'right click on My Computer, right click C:, click format. then install Linux' chain of commands to fix things when users are dumb. Tech support over the phone would be a nightmare. further, how about when you borrow someone elses box, or a public computer. those are bound to be different. those would unfortunatly make things difficult =(

perhaps a key that represents the desktops confiuration.. it might be too big to remember though. *shrugs*

XYZ is dead

[dmccarty]

"The desktop is dead," declares David Gelernter.

Whenever I hear someone* declare something to be dead, it's a good indication that it'll be around for another hundred years or so. Yeah, the desktop metaphor is dead, just like paper is dead.

* Someone refers to the researcher who's inevitably researching what he thinks will supercede what he's declaring dead.

Information Overload

[geomon]

I can sympathize with users who are overwhelmed with the abundance of information that they are fed each day. I have four interfaces that I use on a daily basis, each of which was declared 'dead' by a new technology. I read the newspaper while I eat my breakfast, I listen to the radio on my way to work, I use my computer when I get to work, I do research at home by browsing the web, and I watch my television for infotainment.

No one has proposed eliminating my car radio in any meaningful way. In fact, during the dot com rush, the radio was supposed to be replaced by a satellite fed computer that would do essentially the same thing - stream content. Why change what something that already worked fine *without* a satellite?

I was also supposed to tank my televison for a computer that would play mp3s, surf the web, stream video, and cook my dinner. Why change that interface when all I want to do is watch "6 Feet Under" or "The Sopranos"?

I like the systems the way they operate now. If the researchers were to study how people conduct their daily lives, they might learn that humans use a variety of interfaces to gather information. To use the metaphor of Gelernter, these people seem to be armed with a hammer and view every information problem as a nail.

Voice recognition in the office

[hearingaid]

Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.

I don't understand slashdotters sometimes.

Have you ever been in a callcentre? Okay, they're generally not exactly open plan, but they don't give the drones huge walls, and there's way more than 30 of them in there.

What they do give the drones are headset mics.

This isn't rocket science, folks. Kate Bush, not exactly a hardcore techie, came up with wireless mics in the '70s (well okay she forced her engineer boyfriend to come up with them, but you know how it goes :)

Wireless headsets. That's how you do voice recognition in an office.