Slashdot Mirror
Tactile the Future of GUI?
aaronvegh writes "Slashdot readers have been griping a lot lately about the lack of an alternative to the desktop GUI. In his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielson (love him or hate him) is proposing that tactile, phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines. An interesting read, and a relief from the tired "the desktop GUI is dead, and we'll replace it with....uh....""
I would love a GUI similar to the one used in Minority Report.
An alternative would be a simple OS interface similar which uses radial menus like those in Never Winter Nights.
I've been using my Logitech iFeel mouse, which has tactile feedback, for over a year now. I like it a lot; it's reassuring that widgets in windows are "bumpy". I guess it's like moving to a real keyboard after having used a membrane keyboard. It even works in some games, most notably Black & White which actually had missions that would only appear with a force-feedback mouse.
But unfortunately, iFeel mice have been available for a long time now, but it doesn't seem like they're catching on. People don't seem to want to spend even the extra $20 or so for the feature.
"NanoMuscle is a company that makes very small motors that are an order of magnitude stronger and smaller than traditional electrical motors, yet they use a fraction of the electrical power and they're much cheaper."
http://nanomuscle.bigstep.com/:
"25 for $900"
Lies.
Your eyes have millions of receptors. When you see something like a screen, most of them are actively processing the screen. That is HUGE bandwidth. You are used to using it because your brain is processing vision constantly, so is very accurate.
A tactile interface would rely on a few hundred receptors on a handful of fingers. (pun intended) Unless you read braile, your fingers aren't that sensitive. Your fingers aren't used to being used as a primary interface, and is therefore not that accurate.
Aural (sound) interfaces are much better because they have a significant bandwidth (not as high as vision, but better than touch) and we are used to using them. That's part of why the two most-required output interfaces are a monitor and speakers.
Input interfaces are the same. The best way we have for output is our tongue (seriously), second is our hands. So our two preferred input interfaces should logially be voice and hand. We are used to typing, and always dream of the ultimate speech-control interface. Or you could go to a tongue interface, but I wouldn't want my co-developers to share it.
So as far as User Interfaces go, I think we should strive for better GUIs that can be augmented with sound and tactile feedback.
Just some thoughts.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
The difference between a CLI and a GUI are, really, baggage from a prior generation of systems that should be discarded.
A future interface will be graphical because that allows for more immediate and intuitive use of information. I can know, at a fraction of a glance, that I have Groupwise, Mozilla, and Winamp loaded as "user applications," as well as a working iFolder, netshield, & a couple of other background apps.
The biggest improvement for this will be keyboard integration. I want to push a button (windows key or equivalent) and have a "command area" pop up, which is designed to work with the GUI.
Take the Windows setup and add anything & everything that the Linux CLIs have that it doesn't. Then rework the entire thing from the ground up, remembering that the CLI will work *always* with the GUI, and a user should be able to do everything with the CLI.
A generation after this, and we can replace the command area with voice recognition. The voice subsystem will just feed commands into where the CLI goes, and it'll work exactly as we imagined it would as kids.
I think the better approach to looking at usability is not to focus on different types of media through which we can communicate with the computer, but to focus on levels of abstraction and simplification. For the moment, many tasks that we use computers for involved some pretty low level formatting. Half of the work of setting up a spreadsheet involves fiddling around with cell formatting, and a large chunk of my writing time is spent tweaking the output format or entering data into bibliographic databases so that the computer can format them. Going down to the nitty-gritty details at the lower level of abstraction should rarely be necessary.
I actually think that the command line is a good idea, but currently command lines are too low level, require understanding too much jargon, and commands typically do only single atomic actions. An ideal command would be along the lines of "Find all articles about discourse analysis and Usenet in peer reviewed journals in the last five years."
The reason why the mouse requires so much effort on Windows is that Microsoft (and by extension, most windows programmers) make UI's that take a lot of power away from the mouse.
The example most relevant to your post is the pull-down "File" menu. When they copied apple (or tried to), microsoft changed the location of the pull-down menu bar from the top of the screen (like on a mac) to the window of each respective application. With Apple's way, you can't possibly vertically overshoot the menu bar; with Microsoft's way, not only is it possible to overshoot the menubar horizontally, but you have to watch out for overshooting the menubar vertically as well. Putting it simply, a menu at the top of a screen has faster mouse access times than a menu on a window. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it is a result of something called Fitts' Law, which states that the time to access a target is a function of the target's distance and it's size. For more information on Fitts' Law, check out this article on usability guru Bruce Tognizzini's website.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!