Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's a great Slash-based site with loads of articles examining potential next-gen interfaces. Not a huge amount of traffic yet, but the editor seems to be consistently putting up new articles. Check out Nooface.
--LP
When it comes to organizing my files/folder/shortcuts, I very rarelu use the Start Menu. Instead, I've been using The Brain, which treats documents, programs, shortcuts, program groups, etc as "thoughts" which you can link to any other thought. Pretty cool.
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
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
And yet none of them have taken off. Why's that? Maybe (heretical thought!) it's because the current model actually works quite well for most people.
I don't want a system where the computer organises things for me. I can organise them better myself. (Occasionally I might lose something, but probably less often than if the computer was filing stuff for me. Anyway, we have good 'find' tools on Windows and Unix.)
I don't want a 3-D interface. It's much harder to visualise and navigate than a 2-D one. (A set of 2-D interfaces, as in Mozilla's tabbed browsing or many window managers' virtual desktops, is good. This is perhaps one of the real UI advances in recent years. Windows could do with virtual desktops.)
The article says: "Conceivably, an inference engine can be made so intelligent that [...] machines would automatically present information to you as you need it." Well, maybe when that's true I'll change my mind.
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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.
The article mentions how annoying Clippy is, but says that MS researchers still think a 'helpful' interface is a good idea if done properly. Can anybody think of a good way to do this without it becoming annoying?
One thing that I really hate about those little characters is that they get in the way and take control of the computer away from me. But what if a little box on the task bar showed the three 'most likely' things you wanted to do and you could activate them (complete with little wizards if the task is complex) by clicking?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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 agree about offices, the technology to make voice interfaces work is here today, but the applications is not, however but Voice Interfaces offers a lot of potential for much more personal environments, like the car home & SOHO.
VI offers a number of advantages over conventional interfaces, biomentric security, easy of use & accessability, even for your technophobic mother/granny.
Imagine a home entertainment gateway accessed by voice, no worries about little Johnny snooping your adult PIN. The inherent Biometric security, will make no difference, if he overhears your PIN.
Imagine re-tuning you IP Radio Alarm, by voice, without opening your eyes.
Imagine switching off your security alarm, by saying 'Hello House', and then following up it up with the query "Messages?" without having to log in and remember your password.
Or change channels without having to figure out which of those six seperate remote you need to use, simply by saying 'TV, select channel 4', or 'TV, News' or any number of other scenarios.
I think the killer application for VI is Home Automation.
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
These are all interesting ideas, except for the a few things:
1. Computers organise things hierachically because we like it that way. We haven't been conditioned into it by computers. Remember the game where you pick a number between 1 and 100 and somebody tells you higher or lower? Remember how much easier it was when you learned to start in the middle? It's the nature of things.
2. 98% of the time, you don't need to "search", if you organise things properly. No matter how great the search is, it's always going to be more efficient if you stick things in relevant folders (/documents/biz/2000-2001/invoice110.doc)
Personally, I think the biggest problem with the wimp interface is modal windows (this should not happen ever ever ever amen), and a decent way to keep track of more than 10 open windows/programs.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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.
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