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Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction
Mints writes "Following up on recent "Desktop Innovation" stories that have left some disappointed, I thought Pierre Dragicevic's exploration of Fold 'n' Drop warranted mention. Described as "a new interaction technique for seamlessly dragging and dropping between overlapping windows", Fold 'n' Drop allows the user to interact with layered or overlapping windows in a very intuitive manner. Refreshingly, Mr. Dragicevic provides both a sample implementation, in Java, and video demos. Mr. Dragicevic is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Intuilab, Toulouse."
If you ask me, it'd be much easier to use Ctrl+C and then navigate where you want to go and use Ctrl+V. It's difficult to hold down the mouse button while violently jerking the mouse back and forth to get to the right window.
Don't get me wrong, it looks really neat, but it's not terribly useful. Sounds like the kind of thing that would fit GREAT in Longhorn.
It's always nice to see new ways to interact, but I can't recall a single time this would have been useful in the past week. My memory can't recall much more than that, but the folding corners would certainly annoy me more often than it would actually be useful.
You would think a MacOS X fan would appreciate a more natural and intuitive system for achieving what can potentially be done in other ways.
The Genie effect, translucent windows during a move operation, Expose, virtual desktops, dashboard, automator, tabbed browsing, and more are things for which similar results can be achieved by slightly clunkier or slightly less intuitive/clear/natural operations. They all offer significant improvement.
It strikes me that the window folding offered on the site represents exactly the same sort of thing. Yes you can achieve the same "effect" but you can do that on Windows via the taskbar. Neither expose nor the taskbar offer the very natural and intuitive method of flipping through the windows onscreen like flipping through a bunch of papers. The metaphor is much more clear. It is a significant improvement.
Apple is not the sole source of desktop innovation.
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I'm all for the improvement and innovation of interface design. Making a design intuitive increases productivity, even among power users who may do a particular action only once among a few thousand, and may not have it as ingrained as expected. That said, there are some major drawbacks to this design that may serve to make it less productive and even less intuitive.
Counter-Intuitive Metaphors
Metaphorical abstractions for computer objects only work if they have a clear representation of being similar to object they represent. While some windows (text boxes, for example) have a clear similarity to being a leaf of paper, many others do not; directory windows seem fairly unrelated to 2d objects: they contain multiple objects inside of them, likening them more to being a box or drawer, some 3d abstraction. Thus it is not only counter-intuitive to "fold-over" an object which has depth, but also brutally forcing a metaphor onto an object of which could suggest a completely alien mental abstraction from the one a user original envisioned. For this reason, almost all interface references to real-world objects are either extremely obvious or very broad in definition. The "focus" metaphor works, for instance, because you can bring any object (one with depth or no depth) and put it on top of another object, thus bringing it into "focus" or plain-sight; it is an extremely simple and all-encompassing concept.
Temporality and Spacial Complexity
The second problem with this method is its inherent temporality. Most GUI operation requires no timing, and in the rare cases that timing is required (ie: double-clicking, hovering over spring loaded folder), the operation is extremely simple and requires no precision. The one exception is double-clicking, and you can witness its result by watching any surface user fail to open a folder because they can't keep the mouse still while clicking the left mouse button. The folding operation illustrated here, on the other hand, is an extremely complex operation that takes some very precise timing. Even I, an experienced computer user (as we all are), had to practice it many times to double-back on my mouse movement fast enough to correctly "fold-over" a window. Since windows move and change in organization, the operation is slightly different each time it is performed. I can already tell that even if it the operation becomes somewhat natural, I'll always continue to miss on occasion because of it's complexity. And if I'm having trouble with it, I can't imagine what it would be like for my parents!
UPDATE: I had my mother test it out to see if a surface user could cope with it, and after struggling with it for a few minutes, finaly gave up.
Accidents and Set-backs
The third problem I for-see is that folding can easily occur unintentionally and is difficult to undo. Spring loaded folders and "snap-to" focusing work well because their actions inherently require a very specific action: going over a folder and waiting for about a half a second for the window to pop up. Since the cursor is going to be generally moving while dragging objects, a half-second wait over a folder or partly obscured window is abnormal and requires intentionality. Even then, it is as easily (if not more easily) reversed as it done by simply moving off the newly focused window. With folding, on the other hand, it's easy to see how any quick movement during a drag could activate the effect, and when the process of folding is started, it takes an even more complex spacial action to set it back, that being the looping around and back onto the fold from the other side.
Just a few thoughts on intuitive interface design, using this as an example of what works and what doesn't.
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It's not that they have changed. As I remember it, quite a few people didn't understand Enlightenment. And that window manager really had no innovation, other than bringing eye-candy to X11.
I wrote a few posts a few days ago on this, but I'll repeat...
As much as people talk about innovation, few really want such a thing. That's how it has always been.
Instead of innovation, people want familiarity. Which is why many people years ago did not want to move from text console to X11 when hardware and drivers were finally reasonable. I was one of those people, sadly. You couldn't get me to touch an xterm (or rxvt, my preferred). That is, until I discovered those nice terminal fonts and how it was possible to change the default xterm colors to that of a VGA textmode terminal. That is what I still use today.
I try to be as open-minded as possible, but I catch myself doing those same things today. I've had many discussions with people who claim to want innovation when they really want upgrades to the things they already use. There isn't much innovative about switching from devfs to udev, etc. yet quite a few act as if innovation occurs often.
Given the choice between backwards compatibility or innovation, hardware and software manufacturers will always choose backwards compatibility. Only because that is what the end-user always wants.
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It's funny how you can always tell the OS a person uses by their mouse-prefs.
Linux: the mouse is only good for click, drag, and select/copy. Users believe the mouse is a useless add-on. On Linux, I agree.
Windows: good for getting those right-click menus. Also the only way to do things that don't have obvious keyboard shortcuts - preference dialogs, toolbar buttons, etc.
Mac: Drag and drop everywhere. Bind the middle button to Expose. Eventually you just keep your hands in the Quake position: left hand on the kb, right on the mouse. You know, a GUI.
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