Slashdot Mirror
Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age
UltimaGuy writes "This Editorial describes 8 reasons why HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is in its stone age. It laments about screen corners, filesystem, GUI Design and also 'spatialness'. "
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Some pretty good long-standing beefs listed on that blog -- beefs I've never seen addressed. (Kind of like a recent article I saw talking about cell-phones, and that consumers would much prefer seeing the cell-phone issues and problems addressed before the crap like cameras, mp3 players, video recorders, etc. get incorporated into the "phones".)
Off the top of my head I can add three that drive me crazy:
Yes, we're a LONG way off from interfaces that are easy to use and that make sense to the average user.
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/56-Fitts-Corne rs.html
Interesting read, I think.
"After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen."
:)
"Browse the internet by hitting the screen corner? Check mail in the screen corner? Get Info in the screen corner? System preferences in the screen corner? Switching applications in the screen corner?"
The first and most obvious problem with this concept is that the user must know what each corner does. You should not expect the user to remember this by heart. Therefore, you have to either allocate screen real-estate to show it (doh!), or pop up the information about what happens when you move or click here (doh!). If you allocate screen real-estate, then that should be clickable as well. Doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore, does it? If you pop up information, then you just made your interface more annoying because the mouse sometimes tends to end up in the corners by mistake.
"Ray Charles figured that out. Stevie Wonder figured that out. And they would probably make a better design team than any money-driven market thugs."
Gee, which market thug are you thinking of?
I wish Microsoft would fix their most fundamental user interface problem: Never, ever, ever, ever, ever steal my input directed to one window and start providing it to another. I don't care if the applications are not playing ball properly. Don't allow it. How many times have I hit "enter" while typing, say, in a word processor, but just before I hit "enter" a message box pops up and my enter key is swallowed by it, taking the default action, and I don't even know what happened because I never got the chance to see the question. Or my password being entered into one window's field but ending up in another. Bad.
I'm your huckleberry
From the article: Every single little tiny-weeny little interaction-shraction requires your visual attention."
We are a long way from HCI obviously, as the article does not seem to consider blind computer users as Human. If we focus on the hard problems (one of which is improving the interaction with disabled users) the easy ones will simply fall into place.
for a second there I was wondering how an acid could have an age. ;)
1. Find a computer geek
2. Yell and beat the computer geek into submission to do your computer work.
3. The geek does the interfacing with the PC and not you.
4...profit?
Life is not for the lazy.
"After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen."
Hot corners are not new.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Just to clarify what is built into Mac OS X by default...
In Mac OS X, built into Mac OS X 10.4, you can trigger any of the following from any of the four corners of the main screen.
1) Expose - All Windows
2) Expose - Application Windows
3) Expose - Desktop
4) Dashboard
5) Start Screen Saver
6) Disable Screen Saver
Also on the main display (the one with the menu bar) you can slam the mouse into either of the upper two corners and click. On Mac OS X 10.4 the upper left corner brings up the "Apple" menu and the upper right corner brings up "Spotlight". The later allows typing for spotlight search without having to click to gain focus.
"After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen."
What about OS X? Expose uses screen corners.
... more unfounded opinion masquerading as insight and research. And about HCI again.
Great.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
From TFA:
Have you ever seen a system which lets you, out-of-the-box, hit a corner in order to do anything at all even remotely related to anything having anything at all to do with a document or application?
Hmmm... yea... yea, I have... In the lower left corner of the screen for 99% of out-of-the-box systems when they are on there's that little start button, which does have something remotely to do with apps & docs... Also: what about the menu bar at the top? Upper right-hand corner: close window..
Honestly, I don't know WTF half the articles are on here for... other than us flaming the crap outta 'em..
E = m * c^(Hammer)
yeah, Expose implements some screen corner usage. great. but Mac OS X stil doesn't have any visual feedback when you hover over buttons or any other clickable part of the interface. (no special mousepointer for window resize, no visual button changes to indicate that youre hovering on the proper clickable space, etc.) i'm a-- mostly-- contented mac user, but that really gets my goat. and my goose.
what's the hold-up? it's not like we're talking about the video-game directional pad which was patented decades ago and has a reason for not being standard. (in other words, there's a reason for all the CRAP alternatives. i hope to god there's not a sleeper patent on the GUI/OS feature i'm talking about....)
It's a sign of the End Times when a front-page story on /. actually explains what an acronym stands for.
Chock of shit, well almost.
I actually wrote an application that timed how long it took to click on a small red box with the word click me written on it (distance / time)
After doing the math you could nicely fit a straight line to the points, I even tried splitting out the results based on the direction of movement and their was very little difference and setup a test to explicitly test the 'corner of the screen' theory.
In the end it was no quicker to reach the corners of the screen than a small box anywhere else on the screen. That it probably why no one utilizes the corners of the screen in the way suggested.
I wrote a few more tests and was going to put together a Java applet so that world + dog could help out.
Things like giving your menu entries sensible names and keeping things consistant were far more important for novice and experienced users. I was also looking at things like colour coding, 'vanishing' and growing buttons and other UI elements depending on how often they were used etc...
The main reason for the lack of good user interfaces is that no one ever seems to o solid scientific testing on them, the kind of testing that proves innovations in UI outclass current designs instead of relying on a designers hunch.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I bet you my bunny the former Soviet union could have designed a better operating system GUI than any of the software vendors of today.
We have The Leader (Steve Jobs) thank you very much.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
The author of this article has some valid points here...it's unfortunate that he chooses to embed those few valid points in a sticky matrix of hyperbole, hysteria, and inaccuracies.
Just a few things:
From TFA:That's funny....I was under the impression that preferences were exactly the answer to this issue.
Also from TFA By the way, did you know that a) Stevie Wonder is blind, not deaf, and b) 'shrink' is not synonymous with 'crop'?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I really tried to get more than halfway through the article. But after phrases like " a belly-barn shackle in the reunion of unjustified friends", I couldn't continue. He bemoans the lack of clarity in HCI, yet his writing is a stream-of-consciousness mess.
If he can't communicate his ideas better, maybe he's not the best person to describe what's wrong with HCI. I'm not the brightest bulb on the billboard, but come on -- this guy needs an editor.
It's a sign of the End Times when a front-page story on /. actually explains what an acronym stands for.
Hello...? Slashdot is going CSS, does that give any hints?
Because it burns!
The goggles, they do nothing!
Menus that change. Whoever thought up the idea of menus that hide unused items or change the displayed order based on frequency of use should be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes. Changing menus are one of the worst productivity enhancements of the last millennium. Forget that you can turn it off. It should never have been invented in the first place (no doubt it's patented, too).
Unsolicited offers from the system to remove unused shortcuts on my desktop. I don't need help removing my unused shortcuts. They are there for a reason and just because I haven't clicked on them in a month doesn't mean they're not useful.
Special buttons to page forward/page back in the web browser. I don't know how many times I've accidentally erased my latest diatribe by inadvertently paging backward on Slashdot. Good grief, at least put the function behind a modifier key.
Caps Lock. Who named this key anyway? In Windows, it's not a caps lock key, it's a caps reverse key. And who the hell needs a caps reverse key? hAS aNYONE eVER rEALLY nEEDED tHIS fUNCTIONALITY bEFORE? I wonder where some people's brains are sometimes.
I could go on...and on, and on, and on...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Taco, you're a whore.
My response: thats nice, but I don't have time to care about your whining. Awww poor baby windows treating you bad? I would have respect if the author had proposed solutions, preferably with some diagrams / mockups. Anyone can whine about problems, but if you want respect you should attempt to solve them as well. It would be like if NASA kept releasing reports on how gravity is heavy and then never did anything. I also enjoyed how he took extra time out to mock microsoft and apple. Because I'm sure making an operating system is so easy that the author could do a much better job, all by himself. bah.
Philosophy.
...what the LARGEST KEY ON THE KEYBOARD does. Well... this key? Right over here? Ah, the chubby one! It.. spaces... kind of... leaps.. a tiny bit. In the text... See...? Nothingness! Hey, I know how this must sound... Hey! Wait!! No!!
Hey, how about maybe it's the largest key on the keyboard because it's the MOST FREQUENTLY USED? Wow, imagine that, making something that you use often larger and thus easier to find. Doesn't seem stone age to me, seems more like tried-and-true.
is because they used way too many acronyms and way too confusing words to describe it in the first place.
80 percent of the battle is always marketing - the reason my first commercial (non-military) applications were used by so many people is we wrote it to a grade 10 level for a group that had to have a high school graduation, and we avoided acronyms where ever we could, never assuming anything.
Sadly, it's still true.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a rant on a stupid blog. Slashdot refers to it as an "Editorial"
... See point six." And what's with 8 having no title? Point 8 isn't a point. It's a use case.
The guy's simply a moron. At least half of his "points" are opinions. Others are just not really points at all. "4. Multiple representation of the file system.
Finally...
We wish to rotate an image, shrink it 50%, attach it to an e-mail and send it to a deaf musician. Say Tip a quarter to the right, crop by half and e-mail to Stevie Wonder.
You sir, have failed. You just sent it to a blind musician, not a deaf one.
I'm sorry, but I don't think "editorial" is the terminology I would use here. The correct phrase is "random blog post." Who is this person? Nowhere on the page are the credentials of the author, and nowhere in the post does he/she address anything directly related to HCI. Interfaces of popular OS's and windowing systems represent a very, very small subset of HCI, and attacking these with 8 poorly researched, poorly thought out, hardly substantiated claims is a laughable way to go about showing that HCI is in its "stone age." Human Computer Interaction is a very new thing, much newer even than computer science, which is also in its infancy, and mostly everyone that knows anything about HCI knows this. I realize that sensationaliziing common knowledge with irrelevant bullshit is amusing to some people, but Slashdot is supposed to be about news.
Unfortunately, HCI is an extremely lacking field at the moment. There are too many coders writing the interfaces, but not many are looking at the faults with them. The result? We are stuck with weird things that make no sense.
I am lucky to attend a college with one of the top HCI labs in the country [UMD], but from what I can tell, their main focus is children's interfaces. We need people to actually study what normal users think of interfaces - not the programmers.
I was thinkung it was something to do with finding out that stone age people had discovered Hydrochloric acid.
I'm reluctant to trust an article written by a guy who admits to daydreaming about "sweaty, bare-chested carpenters". And I definitely don't want to consider the symbolism behind the small red tool in his hand.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Am I wrong, or do these two points completely contradict each other?
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
What I hear the most about spatial mode is that:
* The latest Nautilus has it
* It totally sucks and everyone hates it
So I think I can get by without spatial mode (or
3D effects, or any other stupid, distrating eye candy).
This is why we always go back to that little thing we call console. If you use a console instead of a "traditional" desktop, pretty much none of the points made in the article hold true.
;)
Let's see...
1. Four corners..
I bet i can type out a simple command faster than most people can move their mouse to the corner of the screen.
2. OS GUIs..
Any application can include their own console for an experienced user to do things in a faster, more aggressive manner. (yeah, im talking about autocad
5. *ash... so similar, yet so different.
6. Spatialness loses all meaning when you can get to any point in your filesystem with a simple command
8. It's called scripts, and it's a matter of writing scripts that can do things like what the author describes... This is pretty much the sole reason why the console can be the most powerful tool in the world, given time and good interpretation of spoken english. A voice-recognition console for your grandma, so she can say things like Tip a quarter to the right, crop by half and e-mail to Stevie Wonder and have it done in an instant.
Long live the console!
TFA is just a lot of uninformed whining really.
Where's the link to the author's code contributions to HCI design? That's the real question, isn't it?
Here's my problem with the screen corners. Because they're the easiest to get to, they're also the easiest to land on by mistake. To simply have a corner activate a process is annoying, so there must be some sort of confirmation. A click, perhaps. Well guess what, Apple already has you covered, as the top two corners, when clicked, activate the Apple menu and the Spotlight menu. If you put something in the corner, it requires some sort of input to activate, and some other sort of input to perform its task. I'm not sure what you'd want to put in the corners, but for the sake of example let's say you want your application switcher there. Are you sure about that? Would you really rather mouse to the corner, activate the switcher, mouse to the app you want to switch to, and click again? Or would you rather find your app in the Dock/Taskbar and click it?
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
for file in `find . -name \*.[ch] -print` ; do mv $file
I have yet to see a GUI that allows me to select files in this manner, and perform the same operation on all of them. A large collection of archive files that need to be unpacked is usually quite difficult to do in a timely manner on Windows, or in any KDE or Gnome desktop. Oh, you can use the GUI filemanager in Windows or Unix to find files whose names match a pattern, but how do you apply the same operation to each one? In Windows, you will get a new Winzip window opening for each archive, and you will have to operate the controls for each file: extract, close window; extract, close window; extract, close window - over and over and over. What makes it even worse is all the repetitive mouse movement required to hit all the buttons. The extract dialog pops up over here, the close button is over there... you end up moving your mouse around excessively just to land on the controls. Click click click click click click click. I get sick of it.
Suggesting that the corners of the screen ought to do something is right out of the stone age, too. Stop making me move my mouse cursor all over the place. I hate that.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Bah, it's not even necessarily talking about hot corners! Even if you don't set up exposé that way, at least the upper corners are still being used: the upper left is the Apple menu, and the upper right is the clock (or Spotlight, in 10.4). Even though the icon doesn't look like its in the corner, it acts like it is.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I bet you my bunny the former Soviet union could have designed a better operating system GUI than any of the software vendors of today.
Yes, but then the User Interface would be controlling us.
our keyboards and mice cannot be controlled by software. What I mean is this: if you are scrolling through a list of items, the items that are grayed out and the end of the list cannot be communicated to the user through keyboard/mouse. Wouldn't it be neat if the end of a list was communicated back through a keyboard by pushing the key up, so that the user couldn't press it down anymore? For example arrow up and arrow down keys, arrow left, arrow right, page up, page down, keyboard keys. All of these could have the feature disabling the user from pushing the key at some specific points.
You can't handle the truth.
HCl = hydrochloric acid
(where "l" is a lowercase L)
"GUIs are for beginners ... " Then the article makes the analogy of a carpenter who uses the same little red hammer that he used when he was five.
You aren't stuck with the GUI. If you want to go fast, use keyboard shortcuts. You aren't stuck with looking at the screen, use keyboard shortcuts.
Since I touch-type I have created audio cues so I can look at the source material not the screen and still know what's going on.
I think the article is right that UI could be improved a lot. On the other hand, it doesn't solve the problem.
Back when I first got my Windows 3.1 box in 1994, I installed Norton Desktop for Windows (NDFW) to escape the ugliness that was Program Manager. One of the things that NDFW had was a really nice screensaver package for the day (not as nice as AfterDark, but better than the Windows 3.1 defaults). One of the REALLY nice features (which I believe was lifted from AfterDark) was the hotspot corners. You could push your mouse all the way to one corner and click to trigger the screensaver now. You could push it to the other corner to keep it from launching at all for those times when you don't want the screen saver activating. You could push it to still another corner and cycle through the screensavers by clicking repeatedly in order to set your default screensaver. I'm kind of surprised that Xscreensaver doesn't do this at this point. There really aren't many other uses for the four corners though...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
A Rant without viable alternatives is a waste of space.
1. Screen Corners
In terms of using screen corners, Windows uses the lower left corner for an applications menu, the lower right corner for system/application information, and the upper right and upper left corners for application control when the app is in full-screen mode.
As he mentions, expose is invoked by going to a screen corner as well, but apparently has disrespect for spatial navigation, so this does not counter his point...wtf?
2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners
Just using the term OS GUI tells me what an amateur the author is, since the OS and its windowing environment are different concepts, and even though one may always be packaged with the other, they are still distinct ideas.
Why are preferences bad? The author makes fun of them without actually making an argument.
What about kde? gnome? OS X? how about some examples? or do we just get to hear a bunch of rants?
3. Visual Attention - Sine Qua Non
The user has to take focus away from an app to scroll? really? there's no such thing as a scroll wheel? Right now I'm using a touchpad and can scroll both horizontally and vertically without looking away from the text I'm reading.
The author has clearly never used *box, kde (others?) where you can alt+left click to move a window and alt+right click to resize, since again here, you don't have to take your focus away from what you're doing to find a teeny-weenie button.
5. Our love of choice
apparently, choice is bad, and users should be forcd to one pre-determined mode of operation? is this a joke? yes, i agree that it can be confusing to beginners to have too many ways of accomplishing the same task, but this has to do with throwing too much information at them, not having many choices.
6. Our Disrespect for Spatialness
so spatial navigation is apparently great, but there was not one mention of nautilus, or how well its spatial navigation was accepted.
7. Terminology
The terminology we use is a strong indicator of stone age: User-oriented design. User centered design. Come on! Around whom else would the design be oriented?!
apparently the author does not understand the difference between user-centered and data-centered design. apparently the author does not understand much, and I fail to see how this is even a point.
8. [convoluted example]
there is always a trade-off between flexibility and ease-of-use. I can imagine a computer specifically built for this purpose, where you could tilt it to the right (which would rotate your image) and then hit the "email to deaf musician button"
But in actuality, you can simply click on the image, select either the ROTATE option, or click on the button with a rotating arrow, then SAVE the image, and then email it. A fairly complex operation that can be done by beginners.
This is a nice article with many nice points, BUT, this guy doesn't make a single suggestion about how to make things better. If he is so smart, then how exactly does he think we should go about solving this problem? Forget that, I dont need to know exactly, just generally. Anything? Nope.
I, for one, have found that the most productive interface I have ever used is bash or zsh, preferably with several instances next to eachother on a screen so that I can look back and forth between them.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
In the sense that the article is essentially an overlong rant no better or worse than the usual slashdot missive, and that it's on the home page right now, it did at least get past one "editor." Let's see... Ahhh yes, that would be Taco.
We all have our peeves and pet ideas about user interfaces. Only the rare among us write so many ponderous, wooly rhetorical fluorishes into our opinions about those that our opinions undergo a sort of apotheosis, ascending to the level of "article" rather than mere "post."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
If we focus on the hard problems (one of which is improving the interaction with disabled users) the easy ones will simply fall into place.
Bull. Disabled users aren't the same as normal users and designing for them isn't the same. I'm willing to bet blind users would prefer a text only computer, with the information organized in table form so it's easy to follow the hierarchy of information. The CLI, I'd think, would be ideal for blind users.
The real problem right now is that people who are technophobes don't like to admit how good of a tool the computer really is, and how well suited for it's purpose it is. Nearly every solution I've ever seen isn't practical for how computers are actually used. Voice activation in cubicles? 3D immersion just to check your mail?
HCI isn't going to improve vhastly until there's a good system for direct mental interaction, and even then it'll take a long time for people to trust it.
Never confuse volume with power.
I can't wait to see *his* UI design that addresses all these concerns.
I always wondered about the octogonal screens in Battlestar Galactica.
In the future, they figured out that corners are useless, so they cut them out!
So I read the article, and all I find is a diatribe by an apparent madman. Why are we taking user interface design from a person who tries to send "rotated and cropped" pictures to blind musicians? I thought at first it was an attempt at irony, but apparently it is just part of the stream of consciousness that produced misused angle quotes, improper grammatical constructs and just plain odd statements.
Examine his (central) point about corners, for example. Yes, corners *can* be hit easily with the mouse. Isn't that a long way to travel to achieve ones goals? His point about scrolling with the spacebar press is on target (and a feature I appreciated), but then he goes on a tangent about the biggest key on the keyboard producing "nothingness". Considering that each and every word must be separated from each and every other word with "nothingness", I fail to see where its place of honor is diminished by the lack of pixels being illuminated by its use.
Crying shame too: usability *is* important and should be a central consideration. Sadly, I don't think this guy is the one to much of that consideration. Maybe once he grasps the utilization of natural language a bit more, I would consider his ideas on more natural interfaces.
Sig under construction since 1998.
The prime reason why HCI (aka "GUIs") is in such a poor shape is that each application still controls its own GUI.
New OSes have little opportunity for HCI improvements because too many of the details are left down for the application programmers to decide upon. At best, the OS vendor provides a shared GUI library (buttons + widgets), and a guidebook teaching app authors the "right" way to do it.
But, depending on each individual author to carry out the instructions is fundamentally limited and slow. Not every programmer will be aware of the guidelines, choose to obey them, or be capable of following it exactly even if he tries.
And even if all coders were magically obedient to the published standard, it's still non-optimal. New ideas to improve the HCI guidelines cannot be uniformly implemented without waiting years for all programs to be updated. Computers are supposed to REDUCE redundant labor- instead of each app's GUI being written separately, all trying to implement the same guidelines, one piece of code should handle all that functionality in one place. Code reuse is a fundamental rule of software design that has taken far too long to penetrate the HCI world.
What we need are applications written to a high level GUI description service, so that the OS can implement a UI consistent with other programs and exactly tailored to the limitations of this user (Colorblind? Blind? No keyboard? No mouse? No muscular control besides blinking?)
Moving and resizing Windows should be unneccessary. The window manager or DE should handle this for us, learning where we like our applications and what combinations we use them in.
I also think that the UNIX Way (tm) of doing applications (small, modular, and easily integrated) should be brought to the GUI level, so that our apps better communicate with one another, even to the point where you can hook multiple apps together into a single "app group".
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Reason 0: The keyboard/mouse combination is lousy.
...But this is a side point. My deal is that the mouse/keyboard got pressed into service. There's been no serious search for new interface devices that do the jobs a modern person does on a modern computer in a quick and easy manner. We're all just going along with it because it's all we know.
No, seriously. We only go along with this crazy thing because we've been trained that way. We got the keyboard because there were typewriters. We got the mouse because it was better than cursor keys (mostly).
The tablet PC shows some promise, but it is strange that the tablet part isn't offered as a peripheral to an honest computer. I mean, a nice LCD monitor that you can write on with a stylus. You could take it down to do detailed work (photoshop, etc), or put it on a stand and use an old-fashioned keyboard to type quickly.
It would at least be more intuitive to write on the surface you want to manipulate rather than moving the mouse in a plane roughly orthogonal to the plane where the action happens.
And, on a side note, WTF is up with the spatial deciples? Just go use gnome/nautilus and leave the rest of us to our "stone-age" file system tools. We like them just fine, thank you.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Say Tip a quarter to the right, crop by half and e-mail to Stevie Wonder.
This guy deserves it when his computer promptly sends a micropayment to the person in the right side of the image.
Oh, and all you slashdotters worried about Stevie Wonder's blindness preventing him from benefitting from that image, don't worry, he'll just:
Say >>Tell me what is in the image.
Another one bites the dust
While things are far from ideal, I don't think HCI people are nearly the poo-flinging chimpanzees this guy presumes they must be.
For example, the spatial attention thing is a great point, but there are good reasons we use symbology in the interface, because that's how the underlying computer works! It's not that these people are idiots, it is clear that space is important, it's just that they haven't yet built enough layers of abstraction on top of the underlying computer to turn everything into space.
And big surprise, layers of abstraction come with a cost in design research, as well as a CPU hit. It's only been in the last 5-10 years that computers are good enough to support a more spatially aware interface, and, surprise surprise, we're starting to see it appear (witness the OSX expose and dock features, which this guy seems to ignore).
Also, points 4 and 2 are directly contradictory. If you want an interface that works well for both beginners and experts, you'll need different modes of functionality. Witness different ways of accessing files.
works well.
Repeat after me - blogs are not news. And they should have something more to offer than a simple rant to get posted here. All this person has done is summarize the major UI criticisms into one page, and not even offered any concrete, real solutions. Just foaming at the mouth about "what is wrong with you people?!"
:)
Look, here's the things with the four corners and the like - they're great but humans need *identifiable* concepts and workable UIs. That is, there are uses for the four corners (and BOTH MS and Apple uses them to some extent) but an argument of "do everything in the four corners" is silly without concrete, "here is how to do it" suggestions that can be refuted or supported. This is just yet another person telling us - hey, usability could be better. I read this theory in this book, and even today's GUIs don't base *their entire GUI* around it. What horrible interfaces!! Please. So how would our blog author design their OS? I'd really like to know. All I could tell from the blog is that it would have a spacial file manager and probably not allow you to do many of the things GUIs today do for you because it would break a theory.
It's all great to wave your theories around, but OS 9 supported many of these things better than many modern OSes do, and that went the way of the dodo, with a few die-hard usability people screaming bloody murder and the rest of us saying "gee, I'm glad I don't have to have 20 windows popped open to get to a folder." OS 9 was great - in theory. In reality, I wouldn't touch it after the move to OS X.
-- put me off somewhat. Oy oy oy. I imagine the author writing term papers in her or his Freshman courses in college. What attention getting device shall I employ this time? "Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time"? How about "One of the most profound challenges ever confronted by humanity..." instead? They're both such proven winners.
Continuing with the first paragraph, we get some other gems:
Personally I'm skeptical about the "earth" children. Maybe we should hold a focus group that includes some other types of children, too. When we hold it, we will keep those marketing "thugs" from intimidating the kids. That's always been the problem -- thuggishness, motivated by money.
Yeeck.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
While actually having speech recognition might be problematic (dry sore throats, noisy offices), I often wondered why not combine a Inform/Zork parser with a command line interface. It might be a lot easier than traditional scripting. And a lot more fun.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Symphony OS, anybody? They are working on using the four corners as a basis for the Mezzo desktop environment. It is quite nice, and I am sure the linked blogger would get a kick out of it. Too bad it is still in alpha stages.
Design is communication. What's easier to use, an interface that communicates "This is how you do such and so," or an interface that communicates "Hey, you! I'm easy to use!"?
Now, suppose you are marketing a product. Which message gets you the most sales?
Software user interfaces pretty much respond to the same pressures as any other kind of interface. Most interfaces are designed to communicate messages of desirability, not anything as pedestrian as function. Most car dashboards are a mess for that reason. You can get custom color face plates for your cell phone so you have one to match every outfit in your closet, but it's still a piece of shit to use.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I disagree with almost everything in TFA (for reasons outlined elsewhere) except the point that Open/Save dialogs and Finder/Explorer should be unified (although the writer does not put it this way).
My version: abolish open/save dialogs and just use Finder/Explorer. If you're currently limited to files of certain types, figure out a way to deal with that inside Finder/Explorer (since this is a common enough requirement even if you're not in an application -- I am only interested in image files, stop showing me stuff that isn't images).
" I bet you my bunny the former Soviet union could have designed a better operating system GUI than any of the software vendors of today. Not only would their GUI allow you to get the job done faster, it would completely lack preferences, freedom of choice and any settings even remotely related to changing the way you interact. And there's more: Their GUI would provide one way and one way only of accomplishing an atomic task. Imagine what that would do to a context menu!"
What a LOAD o' CRAP, pesky blogger think hes got it down, I for one hate hot corners imagine accidentally moving the mouse to read text and popping an application nothing more annoying than that,also many like having multiple options to do the same thing ty V much.
Now if he had mentioned about creating new HC interfaces altogether , like making the desktop really 3d, like XGL and other technologies are trying to bring, it'd be worth a read. Seriously, Imagine going to the 10th subfolder in a parent by rotating the parent slightly and reaching the nested folder directly, now that is something
Article? What article?! This is a blog site. We dohn neede no steenkeen blawgs.
1: Set the toolbar width to 99%
2: Set the toolbar to be at the top and centered or right aligned
3: Set 'desktopwheeling' to true
4: Set 'toolbar.maxover' to false
This ensures that the top left corner of the screen is always the exposed root window (even with maximised windows), so you can always throw the pointer to that corner and right click for a menu, or mouse wheel to change virtual desktops.
That, and set up key bindings to launch apps where you're likely to want to use your keyboard before using your mouse (like your shell, or Emacs).
Job done.
C-x C-s C-x k
-- MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0, Platform SDK
- to open a car, you must open the doors ,you've to use brakes
- to start the engine, you've to use keys
- to speed up the car, you've to press the accelerator
- to slow down
- to open the windows, you've to use a switches
- you must _always_ look on the streets
I got about halfway through the article before giving up on it. It's too poorly written.
OK, so from RTFAing we know the following:
1. The author of TFA presumably wishes there were a better UI, considering how much he or she kvetches about the existing UIs.
2. Given (1) and the amount of money and fame that would presumably result from a wonderful UI, if the author could create a better UI, he or she would.
3. The author presumably hasn't done so, else TFA would be an ad for the wonderful UI.
4. The author claims his rabbit could make a better UI than Microsoft, Apple, et al.
I infer that we'd be better off reading the author's rabbit's blog than we are reading the author's blog.
It is funny, though, how UI rants are universally unaccompanied by a better alternative.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Damn! Premature submitjulation! Messy!
Didn't manage to properly redo the double French brackets of the quote or my parody in "Plain Old Text"...
But why should "" disappear in "Plain Old Text" mode?
See! I typed "<<" and got ""!
Does "<<" work? Ahhh, of course!?! (don't ask what I have to type to get that)
Maybe you should call it "Plain Old Text which will be interpreted as HTML"?
IMHO, while it's nice to have a GUI for somethings... I'd like to point out how user friendly a CLI is. I can blindly type a command on my linux box and get things done. I don't need to look at the keyboard, I don't need to look at the screen. I type, I hit [ENTER], I get results. The NICE thing is that I never have to pick up my hand and move it to my mouse. I can switch screens, switch windows, run commands, scripts, whatever, all with the click of a few buttons. What's wrong with that? Come to think of it, the CLI solves a number of problems in TFA. This whole windows thing is Overrated Eye Candy.
-=JML=-
Microsoft
And that's not really a bash: I'd feel the same way if Apple's OS had achieved the same degree of market penetration as Windows. But when over 90% of users see their computers through only a single type of interface, other technologies (however worthwhile they may be) are indirectly suppressed. And lets not forget that Microsoft did, in fact, ruthlessly suppress anything other than Windows.
In effect, what we have is a scenario where most of the advanced work in commercialized HCI comes from Apple Computer, with Microsoft selling it's third-rate cousin to people that, for whatever reason, can't or won't use a Mac. I'm not even going to count KDE and Gnome in this because most of what they've done is take from Windows which is a generation behind Apple most of the time anyway. I mean, sheesh, if you're going to clone something, clone the best.
Regardless of what you think of Apple and Microsoft's work in human-computer interaction, the fact is that there are probably other ways in which people could effectively interact with their computers. The "desktop metaphor" has been used successfully for twenty-odd years, but since commercial GUI development is in the hands of relatively few people, we aren't like to see anything groundbreaking for some time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What's that?
He's just ignorantly bitching?
Oh...
This sig rocks the casbah.
pseudo-mod: "+1 Funny"
No kidding. There's a reason the easiest-to-reach spots on the monitor aren't the best place to put "close application" commands. Taking the optical trackball out to clean the thing routinely pushes my cursor to one corner or another. Oops! Closed my browser again.
The author's imagined operating system, in which the corners of the screen are used to directly manipulate applications and documents, would irritate me to no end.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"In the end it was no quicker to reach the corners of the screen than a small box anywhere else on the screen."
You've completely missed the point. It's not whether it's quicker to hit the corners, it's that it's much easier to hit the corners. You can hit any of the corners with your eyes close while standing on your head. That's how damn easy it is. Now trying clicking "Submit" on the first try in the same way.
"Interfaces suck because they don't read my mind."
That's what a college education will buy you.
Isn't THAT spatial!
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I RTFA, and it comes off as a written by someone who isn't very well studied on the concepts of User Interfaces. To be truthful, it sounds like the author just finished reading The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin.
The editorialist makes a few good points, but it's a bit one-sided. He presents a very simplified view of what it takes to build a powerful user interface. There are thousands of scientists with PhDs studying the field of HCI, coming up with answers all the time, but there's a huge leap between what sounds good in theory and what actually works. One persons idea of a brilliant user interface is another person's nightmare that turns their operating system into something that resembles M.C. Ecsher's work.
Games are the breeding ground for examples of where conceptually-superior user interfaces often fail. Take a game like Black and White or Temple of Elemental Evil. Controlling a character or environment is no longer as simple as pushing some arrow keys, it's an exercise in digital dexterity. Even though conceptually it allows you to present more options in a smaller space, it's still foreign to everyone who has ever played another game.
Everytime you try a new user interface, it requires everyone who is comfortable to give up that comfort for the sake of eventually having an easier experience. The effect can be observed when people try using a Devorak keyboard. Technically speaking, Devorak might be a superior idea, but it also represents 4 weeks worth of practice.
The idea that we "should" find a better way to use computers has been around for a long time. Implementing those ideas in a way that the majority of users can accept is an enormous task. If the author really thinks his ideas about user interfaces is a trivial task, he should build a prototype.
Every couple years, someone comes up with a brilliant idea for a new way to interact with computers that involves some sort of surrealistic work of art like a Pyramid Keyboard you stick your fingers in like you're piloting an alien shuttle.
The article is hypocritical. There's no table of contents for each numbered point. For all the talk of making things difficult, why do I need to scroll repeatedly up and down the page to locate information? And why use >> << as some sort of quotation mark replacement? He talks about how intuitive using corners is but he can't use the same symbol to quote a person that almost every English document for the last 3 centuries has. Glass house meet stones.
A console has an unmatched flexibility, but a horrible learning curve, and it is a very inconvenient tool for several tasks. Drawing with the console? 3d-Modeling with the console? Web browsing with the console?
Also, a file manager like Midnight Commander is sometimes preferable over a copy command by using the console, especially when copying, for example, 5 files that cannot be filtered out by simple regexps and/or have awkward names that make it very likely that you misspell them (ok, theres tab-completion, but some shells have problems with this when the filename contains invalid characters).
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
From TFA:
This guy's obviously never used Symphony OS.
---
Perhaps an interface could get the job done faster, it would completely lack preferences, freedom of choice and any settings even remotely related to changing the way you interacl, and require you to study for more than a few minutes to know how to use it properly?
I think his point that making the computer easy for novices winds up compromising the efficency of experts.
After all, it takes a bit of time to learn how to drive a car - sure a student could simply hop in and go, but then they would probably crash. Cue the people who will beat this analogy to death...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Yes, we're a LONG way off from interfaces that are easy to use and that make sense to the average user.
Well, there's an inherent reason for that.
The average user has trouble figuring out which buttons to press on his VCR or even CD player.
A computer has at least a thousand times more features than a CD player.
To a guy who works in a warehouse, and to whom "lever forward; forklift forward" is a hard concept, computers will always be something of a mystery, regardless of interface...
--
AC
Oh, Aitch Cee Eye... not Aitch Cee Ell.
I was wondering why some blogspot "editorialist" has so upset about the state of hydrochloric acid.
Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time: After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen.
This guy seems to have introduced the dubious "innovation" of corner buttons on the desktop. Seems like workspaces warmed over. Big deal. I'll imitate them on my WindowMaker desktop this afternoon. I think he misuses the term OS. He should use "desktop" instead. It is rare to see developers today pursuing the chimera of the perfect UI. This guy is an exception. Still, nothing wrong with new ideas, even if they are minimal.
an ill wind that blows no good
I agree- hitting the corners would happen pretty often without you wanting to activate those "hot spots" but I see this really as being no different than mouse gestures. I envision a UI that lets you hold a move to the corner and right or middle click or something. These could be quite useful and easy to perform a handful of system operations. Hard to learn? Maybe- the OS could handle it like Opera does. When activated the first time- it would annoyingly pop up telling what it is, then you click something saying yeah, that's cool, let's leave that turned on...or not and you're all set.
I also agree with the stealing focus comments... bad.
<cough>http://www.symphonyos.com/</cough>
GUI? How quaint. Wake me up when we get to the Renaissance or Industrial Age and computers can understand and correctly respond to human language, and there's no more futzing about with these clunky GUI things. Better yet, wake me when we can bybass that clunky language thingy altogether with brain caps or something similar.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
The ion WM is a wonderful idea. It may alienate at first, because ion looks like a hacker WM. Ironically, once I tried it, I never had to edit the configuration file - something that is usually mandatory.
/etc/fstab, and write a usbfs mount with an umask that enables usage by anyone. This is NOT user-friendly.
This shows some points:
1. ion window tiling mode makes perfect sense. However, it lacks proper dialog window handling.
2. One of the - if not THE - main weakness of all Linux distros is the fact that sooner or later everyone has to dig through config files. So what, Power Users have to work a bit more in every OS! True, but with a Linux distro, not only they have to. Even things as simple as to get the wireless card to work involves some config hacking. Also, most distros have a horrible bug with scanners which doesnt allow access to the scanner unless the user has root rights. The solution: go to
Thus, there is nothing wrong with config files, as long as tweaking them is OPTIONAL and not mandatory.
3. Many advances can be done if the underlying filesystem is a better database. Directories become obsolete, search is much easier, and as a whole, the system becomes much easier to use. For example, applications have a metadata "Application". Now there can be a menu "Applications" showing all entries that are apps. This is a very active R&D field, and probably the next big thing.
4. Elimination of the RAM/external memory distincition. This is mainly a matter of time. Once persistent RAMs are fast enough to replace normal RAM, the entire software structure changes. "Loading" files becomes obsolete, since it would equal copying a file. As a result, booting reduces to device initialization and program execution - NO loading of stuff into memory needed anymore.
This has some serious implications to the UI. Together with step 3, navigation through the files becomes very easy.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Take, for instance, #6, "Our Disrespect for Spatialness", which apparently thinks that an interface takes a lot of thinking and doesn't allow the user to use it fluidly, comparing it to the lack of thought required to get a fork from the drawer. Retrieving an item within the computer, it says, is exponentially more difficult and mentally consuming that getting an item from the kitchen, which each step must be calculated and reflected by the user, putting to waste the human ability for spatial memory.
With shameless irony, this is listed after "OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners" which has just stated that the interface is indeed all too simple and is too quickly beneath the capabilities of the user!
Every Windows user knows how awkward and frustrating it is when desktop icons are randomly rearranged. We had them in our own peculiar order, or at least had gotten used to what it was, and when we need to go for the trash bin, we always know to look in the same place. Likewise with all our files and programs. We don't have to run a query every time we want to open a document. We remember where we saved it, we have our own systems.
But the "article" would have you believe this is not at all the case; that navigating a computer is all too unfamiliar compared to the ease with which one retrieves a fork or a spoon. You don't even have to think about it, you just get it, but with a computer -- those archaic things that nonetheless are a great font for forced farce -- you have to look and peer and think about what you're doing.
Yeah, right. Most people can't hit a toilet from one foot away, [i]and we do it every day until we die[/i].
I am aghast at the article and apalled that it was posted on Slashdot. It offers no insight, no humor, no actual grievances, no proof that the author can even use a computer -- absolutely no reason to read it or give it any attention at all. For shame.
The guy's point about the spacebar made me think that maybe a redesign of the keyboard is in order. Yeah, there's Dvorak but when talking about the GUI it doesn't have much effect.
One of the reasons I hate Emacs and love Vim is becaue the CTRL key is such a pain to get to (I remapped Caps Lock to Esc and vice versa). But it almost seems like we need a usability study to figure out what keys, how many keys, and where they should be most conveniently positioned to interact with a desktop.
I think most of the keyboards we use are pretty much the same as they were back in the green screen days.
The stone age lasted over 2 million years. Why is everyone in such a hurry?
Ideally, the preferences option would allow you to control the skin of the interface at virtually any level along with the paradigm the interface operates under.
For example, some people don't want an "object oriented" UI, where specific data types are linked to specific applications. On the other hand, some people do.
There are times when you want to be able to use piping in the interface to chain certain combinations of applets, wrappers and applications. This is trivial in a command-line shell, but very difficult to achieve by point-and-click methods in a GUI.
And so on. The list of what you MIGHT want to do is endless. Since the underlying mechanism is simply a bunch of events that trigger actions, there is no reason why preferences should not exist to create sets and sequences of events that meet your own personal requirements.
The upshot of all this is that you'd have an ultra-lightweight GUI that could do basic operations really, really fast. The GUI that the users then saw would be built from scripts and data (possibly XML) that in turn was generated through a conventional preferences selection, pick-lists, flow-charts, CASE tools and anything else the developers thought useful.
You could then completely reprogram what you saw and how the interface operated in purely graphical terms. As you grew more sophisticated and your needs changed, you could rewire your GUI to meet your new requirements.
All of this could be done right now. In fact, it very nearly has happened in some ways - web interfaces dominate some markets, for example, and scripting within interfaces is increasingly common, although nowhere near the level I'm considering.
It is very unlikely GUIs will ever evolve in this direction, however - GUIs are designed to shape how we think about what we're doing, they are deliberately NOT designed to be shaped BY how we think. In some ways, this is a good thing - it provides a focus and it makes it possible for two users to communicate methods. If everything were dynamically definable, there would be no provable common frame of reference.
This would allow a far higher level of individual competency, but at the price of making group competency almost impossible. The current system sacrifices relatively little individual competency in order for groups to work in a standardized way, which allows you to have a much higher group competency.
This is the age-old trade-off. You can't have something that is good for both individuals AND groups - whatever is good for one will hurt the other. As the majority of GUI users are in some sort of social setting, group competency is the more important, so that is what GUIs are aimed at supporting.
So, yes, the "problem" can be solved, and could have been for quite some time now, but the cost is one that the majority of users simply wouldn't pay. Because of that, it is a "problem" nobody has any real interest in solving.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
if you already have your keys on the keyboard- fine- hit f11. If you have your hands on the mouse- use a mouse movement. Try reading this text and while you're reading it, through your mouse to the corner and click... pretend it's an "alt-tab" or something like that. It's not hard to image a use for that. If anyone uses mouse gestures for browsing, it's really the same idea.. back, forward, close, refresh all while not taking attention away from what you are thinking about.
I can give you a great UI, no problem, as most HCI people probably can as well. However, we need to be funded to do so too. The plain fact is that it costs a lot of time and money to innovate and companies aren't willing to take a chance on something just because a few 'l33t' users think it'd be great.
As a GUI designer/programmer I try to get in the best UI I can, but to be honest, you can't go too far out of your way to be 'novel' or 'unique'. Do I like designing for the least-common denominator? No. But my company allows me to do some interesting things where others aren't, but nothing too extreme.
The quote I always hear is 'make it sexy' but in the subtext they are also saying 'but not slutty'. So the analogy is make a GUI people want to marry, not one that's a one-night stand.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Wait, I'm supposed to take usability advice from a website that puts all the text in the center 16th of my screen? Pot, Kettle, black!
Argh! I agree that many current graphical user interfaces aren't ideal, and I'm writing my own rant about it (plus a design that makes it better, which is why it takes so long). This guy, and also amaroK's Fitt's Corners are just painfully wrong in places.
From the Stone Age blog post:
``After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen.''
That doesn't mean that HCI is in the stone age. It just means the leading OSes have it wrong. The GNOME version I am running uses all 4 corners. I don't use any of the functions from the corners on a regular basis, but that's a different story; they are used, and it's obviously because the GNOME team realized their power.
The Fitt's Corners article writes about this:
``why don't any major Desktop Environments exploit the screen corners?
I have a good reason: it's because they are the easiest spots to hit with the mouse.
Setup your OSX box to trigger Expose when you move the mouse to a corner. Now count how many times during the day you nudge the mouse into the corner and trigger Expose by accident.''
This has nothing to do with screen corners, and everything with mouse gestures. It's the fact that just moving the mouse (without any indication that some action is intended) triggers actions that causes these accidents. This is why I always disable mouse gestures in apps that support them.
From the Stone Age:
``2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners.
Ooooh. there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you can grow with your user interface.''
Yes, GUIs are designed to make computers easy for beginners to use. For those who want flexibility, there is the command line, or, if you don't want to leave the GUI world, scripting (think DCOP, AppleScript), augmented with macro recording (think Automator).
What's _really_ wrong with respect to GUIs being for beginners, is that many aren't actually easy for beginners to use. What idiot came up with double-click? Do you have any idea how much trouble this is causing?!
From the Stone Age:
``You have to actually drop focus on what you're looking at and move your eyesight in order to find that tiny little resize button of the window.''
What would you rather have, genius? A 1x1 inch resize widget cluttering up the screen? At least with people I know, resizing isnt a very common operation. If you want to temporary get the current window out of the way and look at another one, just throw the mouse to the dock or taskbar (yep, they're at the edge of the screen in all current GUIs) and click the widget for the window you want to look at.
Perhaps it would be useful to be able to resize a window by holding some key and dragging a corner of it (where the "corner" could be up to 1/4 of the total window size - after all, you need to hold the magic key to activate this mode), but then, holding a key and dragging is something very advanced for many users I know.
Or you could do like a number of advanced GUI users I know, and just partition the screen into non-overlapping frames, put your windows inside these frames, and never have the problem of overlapping windows in the first place!
More insights from the Stone Age:
``Situations like these make me feel sorry for the spacebar. So big and strong... He totally rules over the other keys, and yet all he produces is... nothingness.''
Maybe, just maybe, it's because inserting a space is a very common operation? How usable do you think a keyboard would be if the space bar were as difficult to hit as the 'Q' on a Dvorak keyboard (it's where the 'X' is on QWERTY)? For the same reason, the return key and the backspace are (hopefully) larger than regular keys, but smaller than the space bar.
The Stone Age guy also complains about modern GUIs offer
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
i know others have already pointed this out, but i thought i'd add a graphic to go along. this is a breakdown of the original article based on the frequency of each character used. i thought maybe he'd like to take a look and see wy the spacebar is a big key...r .jpg
http://homepage.mac.com/fizzwinkus/forums/spaceba
(CR stands for carriage return)
I absolutely loved their example of the image manip email thing. I've been doing this in BeOS for years very easily, all drag an drop. Since I'm also using a Touchstream keyboard I can do it all one handed with the gestures it has built in. In fact, it'll be launch 2 apps (gestured- The Awesome Resizer & BeMail) drag and drop the image onto TAR, resize, drag it out (the crop section if need be) to the email app, drop down the receiver. I really can't think of a way it'd be easier, even with voice-type (which I use in OS/2 daily).
My roommate uses the Expose version on her laptop. Which would be peachy, if after over a decade of GUI use I didn't habitually stash my mouse cursor in the lower right hand corner when reading or working in text windows. Absolute friggin pain in the ass. The actions are unexpected, unpredictable, and inconsistent. Programmers who code them in should be castrated, beaten, and shot (or otherwise removed from the genepool).
1- we had to spell out what HCL meant.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Focus stealing should quite literally be an illegal operation, in the true sense of the language!
Also, try this for annoying: in Firefox, open a link in a new tab that doesn't work.
A dialog box will pop up IN YOUR CURRENT TAB alerting you that, HELLO, some tab 26 tabs over from the one you're currently looking at has some problem. Guess what, I do not, even slightly, care!! Go fuck yourself, Firefox!
This problem comes up most of the time because most links on the internet don't work anymore.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Windows XP will try to get you to up the resolution if it notices you're running in 640x480 with low colors... I know this because my ATI AIW 9600 is dieing and in the trouble shooting process I blew away its drivers in order to revert to an older revision... when the machine rebooted the settings were washed away and XP installed some generic crap. It didn't automatically change the settings, but it was a popup box that in 640x480 looked like it took up 1/4 of the screen and sat until you dismissed or dealt with it.
Gravity Sucks
It starts off with a stock piece of Apple propaganda about their overblown and misunderstood "Fitt's law", and goes on to the thing I hate most about the old Finder... "spatial navigation".
Sorry, Apple, when I have thousands of folders I don't want to have to click through them one by one with each new folder in a different part of the screen... my muscle memory is based on what programs do, not where the files they use live on the disk.
I don't want to remember that the spatula goes in the drawer under the sink. I want to hold my hand out and say "spatula" and have it teleported into my hand by the replicator. I can't do that in "real life", but I can do it in my computer... and now I don't have to teach my muscles what drawer the spatula is in, and I can concentrate on teaching them how to use it.
As for the corners... screen corners are crummy places to put controls.
On Mac OS X there's about seven zillion utilities you can get to let you do things with the screen corners, and I've tried maybe half a zillion of them, and they all suck. Why?
First, dragging the mouse to the screen corner blows the context of what you were working on. It's an easy place to hit, but as soon as you've hit it you need to get back to where you started. The net result is that you're worse off than you would be if you had to click a "hard to hit" pop-up menu.
Second, three of the four screen corners are already occupied by the Apple menu, my calendar (on the menu bar), and my trashcan (because I have it pinned to the corner). I've got the third corner set for "start screen saver" because if I put it anywhere else it goes off by accident too easily.
Ah, you say, I have my trash-can in the corner. Yeh, because that makes it easier to hit for those cases where I *really* need to hit it. For the rest I normally hit the context menu and select "move to trash", or use the "delete" icon in my finder toolbar.
Panning... that's a job for a three-button mouse. Grab with the third button and drag. Logitech's mouse driver in Windows lets you do this, and it's great. I'll take it over scroll wheels any time.
Finally: Tip a quarter to the right, crop by half and e-mail to Stevie Wonder.
Wow, I've been using THAT interface for 30 years!
pnmrotate 90 picture | pnmscale 0.5 | uuencode picture | Mail -s "Here's the picture" stevie@wonder.invalid
The commandline is broken. So many people hate it. Why? Lack of visual feedback? The need to memorize many commands and their options?
The GUI is broken. Popup windows constantly getting in the way; windows obscuring where I'm looking. Why is "ls *.bmp | xargs convert $i $i.jpg" so difficult in a GUI?
A complete rethinking of computer interfaces is needed. I think a lot of HCI research is of little use because it's starting from such flawed premises. You can only keep patching holes for so long. Projects like the late Jef Raskin's Archy are interesting and what I consider cutting edge HCI.
Of course, we're so entrenched at this point that any out of the box HCI research is also of little use... For shame.
The best in spatial application layouts!
I think I left my checkbook in the attic...
What is this guy/girl's obsessiveness with german quotes? What is wrong with the good old or tags? It is especially confusing as (s)he gets them around the wrong way, and quotes about half of the things (s)he says, leading to confusion as to what (s)he actulaly wants to be highlighted.
I just tried out the LiveCD for Enlightenment 17 today and that certainly feels like a step forward UI wise. It uses all four corners not that that really bothered me though it makes sense.
More importantly is how 'light' it feels I get so sick of logging onto Windows these days only for my computer to grind for an additional couple of minutes while loads of bloated apps load in the system tray. I mean I've got a dual core AMD, 2GB of Ram and twin Raptor drives and I still wouldn't say Xp feels 'nippy'. Also you get so used to coping with windows little annoyances such as endless tooltip popups that its like turning off a droning fan that your mind has blocked out, suddenly it just seems more peaceful.
Considering its still development code it feels very stable, all in all I'd highly recommend checking it out if you haven't yet.
http://www.elivecd.org/
I'm finding myself increasingly torn between Linux and Windows these days, the techie in me is dying to break free of Windows; however, two things keep me chained to it Games (I know Cedega but its not quite there) but the biggest stumbling block is Visual Studio.
As a developer Visual Studio is the backbone of many a work enviroment and home project and until such day as Microsoft release a Linux version (the same day hell freezes over) or Visual Studio runs fine under WINE (the day before hell freezes over) I'm going to have to keep a Windows partition around. Who knows perhaps VMWare will release the shackles one day though it's a pretty price to pay to cut the ties that bind.
And thats not being anti Microsoft I just think more and more users these days want to be free to use whatever they feel is the best product without being locked into one particular way of doing things. If Vista turns out to be better than whatever Apple and Linux are offering on a particular day then I want to be able to switch.
Try to file bug for the popup problem. Ask (nicely) for an option to disable all these reconnect popups. First they will bitch you of that it's not their problem. Then they will close the bug.
Sometimes I just don't get these people. Mind you I even know someone who maintained a patchset for this feature for a longtime. He can probably still be found around the Freenet / TOR projects.
...at the elephant in the room which is UI.
IMHO, using technical arguments to shoot down an admittedly vague whine about UI is missing the point: users shouldn't have to be technical
But as noone can think outside this particular box yet, or are hostile to approaches that might lead them out of it, nothing much can be added. And users are still frustrated.
I think the parable of the VCR is still relevant. If VCR programming is still arcane knowledge to most people computer UI has a LONG way to go.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
While strictly off topic, a more entertaining "8-Point Agenda" is this one from UK hip-hop artist The Herbaliser, complete with summary at the end:
Up, livin' it up, livin' not... givin' up - setting
Government and loving it, so we self-sufficient
Not trippin' off of that subliminal stuff
We not submitting coming with it rough and tough
We gonna suppliment your knowledge with.. a substance
We not gonna let an opportunity get left out
We not... gonna let some indecision stop what we about
We not... gonna show no mercy over flowing the drought.
Point one: [No bitin']
Point two: [I'm writin']
Point three: [You ain't and]
Point four's point four
Point five: [Recognize]
Point six: [Make adjustments]
Point seven: [Is a testament]
Point eight: [Go on, set it now]
Here is a good PDF document for various approaches to HCI. Sorry, the direct link wouldnt work in the /. form.
resize: is e.g. gnome ALT+middle (while alt+left
moves)
also if you pre-run things (e.g. run mozilla in virt desktop 2. alt+2 takes you there -> no interaction required....
corner: whatever you put there, a panel, a button, a whatever
folder issue : what is a folder
spatial navigation issue: you know your filesystem
"cd ~/pics/porn" you know that it is there
the file encoding issue:
man convert - then convert the image
man mpack - then use this to miem-encode the file
and send it to someone
then you do not have to locate the file and do all that, just type parameters
thatthingisuselessImgoingtoquitusingitfromnowon
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Hot corners become practically useless with multiple monitor setups. Defining functionality as part of a corner sets requirements that there is a hard boundry between monitors. (Bad) Or that a standard shortcut will be hard to reach for me (Bad).
I prefer the idea of hot corners being optional, user-established, activation options so that I can map their shortcut abilities to a keyboard funtction key if I happen to be hooked up to a multi-monitor system.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned in the article or the forum so far, but it's a shortcoming I notice often in my day-to-day computer use.
No modern operating, in my experience, enables the user to click in more than one place at a time. I know, even those of us with multiple monitors rarely feel the need to grip and reposition two or more windows at a time, but what about gestures? Wouldn't it be nice to grip two edges or corners of a window and resize or rotate it?
To my knowledge, the only products that enable this type of interaction were made by FingerWorks [http://www.fingerworks.com/%5D, which is no longer in business.
Touched screens can be messy to look at, but multi-touch pads are a very good idea.
I guess it is time for you to switch window managers. I myself am using XFCE4 on my PC. And no problems like that for me. I even told it not to give focus to new windows. So when I am typing and a new window opens (for what ever reason) my key codes still goes to the original program. Try that with MS-Windows.
So, can you enlighten me as to how to set Firefox to display error pages instead of error dialogs? I'd like to consider myself a reasonably intelligent user, but after going through all the options under "Tools->Options" in Firefox 1.0.6 on Windows, I can't find anything remotely close to this type of option.
This further points out the usability issues with many programs...
The article seems to think that the USSR would design a better GUI than the ones we have now. At least it didn't say: "In Soviet Russia, GUIs design YOU!"
I am what I am and thats what I am -Popeye
Try going international with that. I think people on slashdot forget that there's more than just English speakers, from an English society. You'll soon find that HCI is harder than it looks.
I hate people who have the pretense to know what's better for everyone out there.
People should stop assuming that real life metaphors are a better solution for everyone.
His arguments in favor of the spatial model are fine as long as you assume that everyone is more used to manipulate real life objects in closets, drawers and boxes than they are to manipulate stuff on a computer.
Because of my job (and centers of interest), I spend most of my time manipulating stuff on a computer. As such, I'd rather have my closet present its contents in a list tree than have my computer files presented as a real life metaphor.
Of course, I don't pretend to know what's best for everyone. That's why suggesting that preferences are unnecessary is idiotic.
The only solution that would be acceptable as far as I'm concerned would be "reasonable defaults" that people more familiar with physical objects than stuff on a computer would be able to deal with more easily, preferences out of the way by default, but existing, and let people switch back to the current way of working if they want to do so.
Also, his article is very critical of the way things are done currently, but don't provide much practical solutions, except get rid of preferences, put stuff in the corner, and a couple random specific use cases, so it's essentially pointless.
too.
Look, I've personally been studying (undergraduate-level and on) HCI since 1984 and the first ACM conference on the matter was in 1982 (the "1982 Bureau of Standards Conference on the Human Factors of Computing Systems", if you remember it).
So the darn field's been around more than 20 years and it's high time the systems we implement started using more of the knowledge we amassed. Did you know that the incident at Three-Mile Island was caused by a (preventable) HCI problem?
I read the headline and thought it was saying there were eight reasons Hyrdro-Chloric Acid (HCl) was still in its stone age and got really interested.
All these posts about HCI and not a single one of them links to Jacob Nielson?
WTF???
I saw this title and I was like, "What, table salt is outdated now?"
When I first saw this headline, I thought it said HCl. I was like WTF? Then I RTFS and realized it wasn't nearly as interesting as I had expected. :(
When asked to list usability guidelines, 90+% of computer programmers can only name Fitt's Law, if they can name any at all.
You can't solve a problem if you don't know what the problem is.
I have two monitors of different sizes, so my "screen" is 'L'-shaped. In other words, it doesn't even have an upper-right corner -- or if it does, it has one on each monitor. Of course, since the left monitor is 2048x1536, it takes so long to move the mouse to any corner from the middle of the screen that it's pointless to make that action do anything important.
dom
At least MS is trying.
Check this out:
Put the mouse in the bottom left in 2k and you'll see it won't activate the start bar.
In XP/2k3, you see it'll jump the mouse pointer into the start button activating it.
Additional issues arise with very large (30") monitors like the big cinema display, where again separating an application from its menu doesn't seem to be a wonderful idea. Too much of Apple's UI design research stems from a time in which the entire screen was a single 9" display.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
(I'm the author of CornerClick, a Mac OS X application for assigning actions to screen corners. ($0 cheap!)
Lot's of people here aren't getting it. I can only assume that they are not power-users, or haven't actually tried a good implementation of Fitts' Law.
I tried in my application to: make the corners absolutely unobtrusive when you aren't using them; make the result of clicking a corner easy to figure out without accidentally activating it; make it easy to figure out how to trigger a certain action if you've forgotten how; and make many different actions easily triggered from a single corner.
I think I've done a good job, and the only reason I made CornerClick was because the lack of corner-triggered actions was really frustrating me, knowing that they could be so useful. So first of all, I made it for me to use, and I would consider myself a power-user. I'm a software developer, a computer junkie, and I use my powerbook nearly all-day, nearly every-day. I've followed Apple's slight UI improvements since I first got into macs at Mac OS 7, and I felt some frustration at this area of improvement that I felt they had been ignoring.
Now, some people are pointing out that lots of Mac OS X users using 10.2 or later frequently run into this problem: during mousing around, their cursor strays into a corner set to automatically trigger Exposé. Suddenly, every gaddam window of every application flies around the screen and whatever they were working on is lost in a maze. They use this example to say that using screen corners to trigger anything is a dumb user interface. That certainly doesn't follow. It is certainly a frustration to run into this collusion between automatically triggered corner actions and a disorienting window-navigation system, but for me corner actions are most useful when they are not automatically triggered, and Exposé is for the most part eye-candy novelty that I never use.
Turn off automatic corner activation of Expose. Set your two of your most common applications to the top-left and bottom-left corner using CornerClick (for me, Safari and Mail, respectively). Set the bottom-right corner to "Hide Current Application". Assign secondary applications to right-click each of those corners (for me: Terminal, iChat, Finder). If you want add some others for shift-click, control-click or any other combination you like. Try it out. After a while it becomes second nature to click in the bottom left to check Mail, and then click in the bottom right to hide it when you are done. I find it much easier to navigate to the frequently used applications I have this way than to try using the Dock or the command-tab application switcher. And by easy, I mean I can do it fast and I can do it without thinking about it or having to look (hunt with my eyes) anywhere on screen. This reduces the number of "brain-cycles" I have to spend on useless interface crud just to get the important things I want to do with the computer.
However, like I said, I believe I'm a power-user, and so perhaps most people don't mind the 1/2/3 seconds it will take them to switch between frequently used applications or change tracks in iTunes, or whatever.
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
It reads like it was written by a 3rd grader. I couldn't even get through it. It has too many rambling sentence fragments. The author really needs to pay attention in English class.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Now that's insightful. Mod it up! :)
This is not a problem with the existence of forward and backwards buttons, it's an issue with their implementation.
;)
In other words, the grandparent's problem is with I.E., and that most sensible browsers I've used other than I.E. don't blow away post information when I use the back and forward buttons by mistake.
Just wanted to make sure the I.E. flamethrowers knew this was fuel
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
http://www.symphonyos.com/, uses the four corners for its popup menus, categorizing by corner in a fairly intuitive way.
:-( It's like crack.
Some of Opera's mouse gestures (back, forward, minimize, new and close) are very good muscle memory instances. Once you get used to it you stop thinking about it. One more reason I can never stop using Opera
I was kind of suprised nothing like this was mentioned since these are cases where its a small (or even miniscule) group trying to use these newer ideas in HCI to push their market share.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
In linux, an application called "brightside" does something similar.
Yes, you could argue that I'm the bad part of the equation. I'll go and change my /. filters to fix this.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Face it, we will not be able, in the next 40 years even, to come up with user interfaces that appease the last couple of generations that still believe that computers should read their minds. Try as we might, we will just never get there. So instead, I say let nature take its course, and redirect the effort into inventing user interfaces that actually read you mind - cause that would be freakin' sweet!
sic transit gloria mundi
... why not design an OS for us gimlets to use. Oh, and by the way, thank you for putting us straight on what works and what doesn't. Where would we be without you?
and so on...
...instead of 'authors' requiring a dictionary as they write. Hazzled?
i suppose my grief was more of a historical artifact. from the days of playing sega genesis as a kid and wondering why the controller was terrible, then there split-button d-pad for playstation... and then came those god-awful PC gamepads (especially the microsoft ones).
"By the way, did you know that one-knob faucets were originally designed for disabled persons?"
That explains how retarded they are.
Focus-stealing absolutely drives me up the wall. Ironically faster computers can be even worse than slower ones with this. I can't tell you how many times I've started typing a URL only to end up in the google search box half way through.
If you are using an input box all other attempts for top focus should be put on hold unless a critical error has occurred that would prevent that input box from functioning. I'm sure there are tons of ways to get the users attention when he's finished.
- Spotting flaws in any technology - easy.
- Recommending a solution is - good.
- To fix the problem before everyone gets used to the broken implementation - divine.
Just like this guy's rant against Windows, it seems everyone now knew that New Orleans was doomed. Problem was, everyone got used to it the way it was, and felt the money could be better used elsewhere.Example: QWERTY keyboards sux0rs!
Example: Dvorak keyboard r0x0rs!
Example: I've never met anyone who uses a Dvorak keyboard.
Wake me when there's some real news.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
When I first saw the headline, I thought scientists have suddenly come up with a better acid to digest food over HCl. Seriously, HCl is as old as the stone age, but I'd like to see you come up with a better way to digest your food (hint: see the "Red Hot Catholic Love" episode of South Park).
HCI's not in the Stone Age; it's in the Industrial Age.
There has been *no* innovative research done in HCI since the Mac UI guidelines.
Guys like Tognazzini and this guy just like to make laundry lists of their complaints and harp on Fitt's "law." (I guess "law" sound better than "tautology.")
My basic complaint boils down to this:
These guys think like industrial era efficiency experts. Now, if people who used computers came in at 9 every day and left at 5 and did essentially the same set of tasks for months on end, many of their assumptions would hold water.
It would make sense to have them use corners of the screen. It would make sense to memorize arcane "gestures."
But most people I know face a completely different setup:
Someone else sets up their computer or they often have to use other people's computers. They often have to do other people's jobs, or they are changing jobs quite rapidly.
Moreover, they spend an extraordinary amount of time copying and pasting (or retyping) data from one app to another. When something changes, they have to update it in multiple places.
My analysis is simple: our applications and HCI people are too focused on visual representations of data. So most of what HCI does is nothing more than put an odometer on the mouse.
We need to focus on the logic of the data itself (data fundamentals!) and the way the people learn interfaces.
As it is, the way we're using computers is directly analagous to the way we use paper. That doesn't exploit a fraction of the power mathematics and machines could give us.
"You seriously would prefer to play a game like Half-Life 2 by repeatedly typing "/shoot shotgun @ headcrab;/shoot shotgun @ zombie;/shoot laser @ cyborg-alien-police-thing;" ? "
Actually I'd go more for:
% hl2 -shoot -headshot -nearest_opponent :-)
% !!
etc., or perhaps make a perl script to loop over it.
...we're still discussing things like screen corners and windows!
We look at the entire contents of our computers through tiny little screens. Imagine if you had to access your desk and filing cabinet in 2D through a 21" rectangle?
We manipulate the contents of our computers through keyboards and mice. When you put a piece of paper in a folder in the real world, do you do it by pointing and clicking? No, you pick up the piece of paper with one hand, grab the folder with the other and flip it open, slip the paper in, etc. Much quicker and more fluid.
Until we start exploiting the much more powerful methods of interaction that humans are capable of, HCI is not likely to make any great leaps forward.
Can someone give an answer for us non-Mac users who have played with a Mac in some retail store? Is there a way to get applications to run full-screen, or must Mac users always worship the Dock?
This guy has obviously been tortured by Apple too long. If he thinks that there's no way to scroll without aiming for tiny scrollbar icons, it's obvious that he's never owned or even seen a mouse with a scrollwheel.
The only way this could possibly occur is if he's a graduate from the Apple School of One Button.
Maybe we should send him a link to the Mighty Mouse page so that he can catch up with the rest of the world.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
You can't use a car without understanding what the brake and accellerator (and sometimes a clutch) do. When you take it in for repairs, even if you don't know how to fix it yourself, you want to know if you need a spark plug or a timing belt (not just "it broke, please pay $xxxx for the next 20,000 miles...").
Let's take a look at cars, though.
But despite all this, people don't write massive essays (where "essays" is taken to mean "uninformed bitching") about how cars are in the stone age. Maybe someone needs to address the usability problems in cars, before they start with more recent developments like computers.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
For the last 10 years or so, I have wondered about a few ideas in computer science. First, I believed then that we would be moving back toward a more mainframe-dumbterminal model of the past. This seems to be true with "client-server" relationships that we now have and the use of such mechanisms as web services (be they rich client or web application [like AJAX or whatever its name of the week is]). The second debate in my mind is the possibility of moving back to solid-state mediums as the major storage mechanism (after a very long time) of the primary storage being disk-based. This has no real relevance, although I still believe that disk-based storage mechanisms will give way to newer solid-state mechanisms such as those being developed at Atom Chip Corp.. The final belief of mine had to do with UI. I wondered 10 years ago whether or not GUI would have a permanent place in computing and UIs would only evolve from GUI or whether a re-emergence of text-OSs would take place. I believed (and still do to some extent) that OS GUIs are just crappy. They simply are good concepts in a beta or even alpha-testing exoskeleton. The most I can as the user define a GUI is what "theme" it is. Consider that this is on most GUIs; some apps provide more support for GUI-customization. The fourth and fifth ideals I held were that a) the filesystem is just too arbitrary and b) the Unix-style structure to accomplishing tasks, with smaller more focused functions was more powerful than using a large application that most likely reused old code and provided limited flexibility. In fact, I am a staunch opponent of the filesystem model. This seems anti-Unix, yet I am a proponent of Unix.
This article falls because it does not describe wht the future should hold for computers. It simply lists a problem. I find a few solutions, each with interesting consequenses. The first is that data is not stored in files. This seems odd, Unix revolves around the philosophy of the file, but today we have grown beyond odd, arbitrary aggregations of code that are arranged into odd, arbitrary hierarchies. I want access to my data quickly. I want to be able to search for instances of a persons name in document files as well as contact files. I can do this with current filesystems, but it takes a while to search (I do not have Tiger yet, although OSX on x86 calls...) Data-storage and manipulaiton is the purpose of computing. The days of a text-terminal are gone and will be forever. But the days of strict GUIs will not last forever either. We don't still need icons to interact with computers, and most of us /.ers never did.
A friend and colleague of mine, a rather revoultionary thinker in computers, suggests that instead of storing the current state of data, the computer stores the actions that got the data to its current state. In his words, "a painting is the sum of the artist's brushstrokes." If we did store actions rather than data state, consider some of the possiblities. I think that this is the next generation of Unix. Instead of files, actions dictate everything. Interfaces with these actions are not precisely dictated. A user could interface via phone, browser, rich client, local machine, etc. As long as the major assholes of computing stay far enough behind (the MA's being DRM proponents and convicted monopolists), computing will continue to amaze all of us. Ten years ago I was 6 and dreaming about what we are beginning to see today. Imagine what the children of today are dreaming about. Then imagine that it will become reality.
I'll start by comparing screen corners to pie menus:
To quote Tog on Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." He points out that "the screen edge is, for all practical purposes, infinitely deep."
But the advantage of "screen corners" is just an indirect and wasteful application of Fitts' Law, which pie menus exploit much more directly, efficiently and flexibly than "screen corners". Tog's "screen corner" argument is just an ex post facto application of Fitts' Law: an after-the-fact rationalization, not the reason they originally designed the menu bar that way. If Fitts' Law was really the reason Apple designed their menu bar that way, then why aren't there four menu bars, one at each edge of the screen? Apple never mentioned Fitts' Law in their infamous menu bar patent.
Pie menus "slices" are better than "screen corners" or "menu bars" because:
Screen corners and edges are static and fixed in number, so they only enable a small fixed number of global commands at once.
Pie menus are dynamic and context sensitive, so each pie menu can have multiple slices, with a different set of functions associated with each, including submenus. The screen only has four corners and four edges, but pie menus are extremely reliable with eight items, and can support up to 12 items reliably.
Pie menus also support submenus, so you can have an infinite combination of pie menu items, depending on the context you click on, instead of just four screen corners or four menu bars.
Each pie menu item is easier to hit than any screen corner, because every pie slice target area starts directly adjacent to the cursor and extends all the way out to the screen edge, and beyond!
Screen corners and menu bars flaunt Fitts' Law by requiring you to physically move the mouse a large distance, and they usually leave the cursor far away from the object you're manipulating.
Pie menu target area "slices" extend all the way out to the edge of the screen and beyond, so their area is quite large, but you don't have to actually move all the way to the screen edge to select them. You simply move the cursor outside of the small inactive area in the pie menu center. Each "slice" target area starts out directly adjacent to the cursor, in a different direction, and occupies a large area extending out to the edge of the screen.
Fitts' Law relates the target seek time and error rate to the target area and distance from the cursor. The bigger the target and the closer the target, the faster the seletion and fewer errors. Pie menus maximize the target area and minimize the target distance, so consequently they minimize both the speed and error rate, as Fitts' Law predicts.
Pie menus have been empirically proven to be 20% faster than the linear menus, and about half the error rate ("A Comparative Analysis of Pie Menu Performance"; by Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman; Proc. CHI'88 conference, Washington D.C.)
Screen corners are worse than pie menus, because they actually have smaller target areas than pie menu slices, and actually maximize the distance from the cursor by putting the target as far away from the cursor as possible.
Tog claims the screen edge target area is "infinitely deep", but in practice you never move the cursor an infinite distanc
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
For my man Stevie, shrink is synoymous with crop.
"Cropping" an audio waveform in the time domain involves cutting off the beginning and/or end. Likewise, "cropping" in the frequency domain involves a low-pass, high-pass, or band-pass filter. "Shrinking" might refer to downsampling (a low-pass filter followed by a decimation), but it might also refer to time stretching.
There are times when you want to be able to use piping in the interface to chain certain combinations of applets, wrappers and applications. This is trivial in a command-line shell, but very difficult to achieve by point-and-click methods in a GUI.
Has anybody thought of modeling stdin/stdout redirection and pipes using something that looks like a circuit diagram, with blocks that look like ICs representing programs and wires representing pipes? Go look up LabVIEW to see this in action.
Just like silence is the most important part of a song. Even Stevie Wonder knows that.
Try telling that to the radio stations that cut off Stevie Wonder's "Part Time Lover" 3/4 of the way through when the song goes momentarily dead silent.
Your right thumb was still on the spacebar, but the left thumb was over the delete key (that's backspace for you beige-boxers).
Which completely throws off anybody who routinely hits the spacebar with his or her left thumb. If the left half of space were meant to be backspace, that would have happened on at least one widely sold typewriter.
a click in the very corner will move the mouse pointer a few pixels so it IS over the button
Not if I, like so many other users with smaller screens, have enlarged the taskbar to two lines. The code in Windows Explorer that nudges the mouse pointer fails to take into account that the Start button has moved.
With people like him working as "usability designers", it's not surprising that usability often sucks. The problem is not that what he says is strictly speaking wrong, the problem is that it is only sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and often explicitly secondary to other considerations.
I use all four corners on my Macintosh, but is it good design? I don't think so. Once you enable those features, the computer becomes expert-only. You can hit them accidentally when going for a menu, title bar, etc.; all the Windows disappear, or something else horrible and frightening (to a novice) happens. And once you are done activating them, you have to move your mouse all the way across the screen for interacting with the application.
The corners become really confusing on multi-headed desktops; which corners trigger what? And how about moving across two or three displays in order to get to that corner, and then back again? The menu bar at the top of the primary display and the spotlight button suffer from similar problems.
The Macintosh UI is an excellent example that Fitt's law doesn't make for good GUI design in general, and that there are other considerations for where to place UI elements.
Unfortunately, Apple has painted themselves into a corner: the menu bar at the top has become a kind of trademark; they simply can't change to something else easily without upsetting a lot of their die-hard supporters.
Purpose: on applications with scrollbar, move scrollbar with cursor (if possible), so that cursor is always in same place on the screen. I make use of this on occasion.
Scroll lock is also used as a toggle in some game interfaces.
Human Computer Interaction, for many, seems to have been pegged down to the windows 95 explorer.exe interface. The best project(s) that I've seen to demonstate possible Ideas is the OpenCroquet project:
[definition]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
[project]
http://www.opencroquet.org/
It's only a dev release, but very promising. PhD. Alan Kay, the head of the project, has some 40 years experience and has been in the lead of many tech projects, such as the Xerox Parc team that made smalltalk and a lot of other great stuff. To be amazed, check out this site for Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation: http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html
The commands both also blow up if a file literally called *.c exists. Tee hee.
Sometimes I think we should be allowed to vote for a particular user comment that will appear at the TOP of an article submission, INSTEAD of the actual article itself - because what we have here is another case of slashdot commenting (and the moderation system) turning out higher quality content than the original article contains.
My own retorts (I'll be using OS X as the example):
1. Screen Corners
TFA claims that screen corners are both under-used and not specific enough. But the alternatives offered suffer the fate of being:
Screen corners are ALWAYS THERE, so they need to invoke actions that are always useful. That's why we have corner-activated searching, preferences, and file management. What's more, they are part of THE SCREEN, and a user will tend to consider them in that context. That's why we get screen-corner activated window managers, screen savers, screen locking, and task-switching. If I wanted to I could probably assign some bizarre Automator-based sequence to a screen corner ... but frankly, even the corner is too far to travel. I have Expose assigned to a fourth mouse button, and I don't even use screen corners for anything automatic: All the actions that occur there require a click to invoke, which is the way I like it.
Verdict: TFA is complaining about nothing.
2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners.
The OS GUI is only about as "designed for beginners" as the automatic transmission in a modern car is. It's easier for a "beginner" to learn how to drive a car with an automatic transmission, because he or she doesn't have to worry about grinding the gears or destroying the car by accident. But the automatic transmission was not invented to make driving easy for beginners. It was invented to make driving easy, PERIOD.
This conceptual difference applies just as well to the computer interface. Customization and automation features have become quite advanced - and we have also culled the worthless customizations from the useful ones. That's why the OS X UI is not "skinnable" out of the box, but you can change the layout in the scrollbars the instant you first log in.
Verdict: TFA is whining for no reason.
3. Visual Attention - Sine Qua Non
Kazoo the Clown put this better, nine months ago. As for the resizing window example, sorry - I don't resize my windows very much at all. Even if there were keyboard shortcuts for it, I probably wouldn't know them. (Note: There are, for general actions like "hide" and "minimize".) OS X has managed to find away to avoid stealing context from the user in almost all cases, excluding messages that are extreme emergencies like the sudden failure of a device, or an imminent battery death. (And even that just appears
I don't think it's even the default behaviour to activate expose at the corner as you described - when you laugh at that powerbook owner you are laughing at THEM, not Apple.
On my mac the corners do nothing because corners are too easy to accidentally hit to do anything that might mess with focus. So my top corners just let me click to bring up menus. I don't remember setting it that way explicitly.
Next time try laughing at OS'es that don't let you do things in the corner at all even if you want to. And on Windows or X-Windows, how many pixels is THAT from your menu edge? Why it varies on what window is in focus. That sure is better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Corners are inviting for those HCI guys because they are SO very easy to reach.
But that's also a detriment. Something that easy to reach should never, in my mind, cause anything to happen that would distract you or take focus from your work.
I tried hot corners but couldn't stand them as I find the corner a naturally good place to park the mouse, and at the top edges a nice easy way to reach the menu.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From "It's All About the Pentiums":
"You're just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would posit that moving the mouse to a screen corner *without looking at it* is faster than clicking a box which appears in the corner.
While on the face of it that statement is true, I do not think it means anything.
If a user is trying to reach some section of the screen they are generally look at the area they are trying to get to, and the eyes will always travel faster than the mouse. Why would you ever have a case when a user is trying to get to some part of the screen they cannot see?
Furthermore what does it matter where the eyse went, to me the actual measurement of time taken to reach a goal is itself the most useful thing to know. It doesn't matter if the eyes took a little longer to rest on something if the mouse pointer was able to begin the journey to the general area beforehand and the eye refines the target on the way. Tracking eye movement can only confuse the question you are trying to answer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The prime reason why HCI (aka "GUIs") is in such a poor shape is that each application still controls its own GUI.
I would argue that in fact one of the things holding us back is that apps for so long have tried to conform to some idea of what an "ideal" GUI is.
The freedom I see is in releasing each app to have a very specialized interface which is controller less and less by the host OS. Then UI's can be built suited for the task at hand, and not OS GUI designers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why make the spacebar so easy to hit when all it produces is nothing?
Well why is air so plentiful when all it does it take up space between things. Perhaps we should get rid of that as well.
Mant times the empty space around something is more powerful than the thing itself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps a good user interface option would be a gradual increase in flexibility/complexity. When a user first sets up a computer, the installer asks some basic questions about windows, mice, hard disks etc. and from the answers determines the user sophistication. From this it then determines that the system must start up with a simple user interface (perhaps the simple finder under OS X), and then gradually unlocks the complexity?
"Cannot find the file 'msconfig' (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available." (Win2k). It does work in both WinXP and Win2k3 Server, though.
Which is about as intuitive to people who aren't CS majors as MIPS ASM; both the error message and the method of invocation!
Why doesn't Windows have a standarized interface to this? Who knows? Ubuntu is, thankfully, simple enough I can start to ween the people I know from the tits of MS long enough that they can start to look at Apple's offerings.
Once people realize that there exist applications different from what is familiar to do what they wish to do, they suddenly feel empowered and can move past MS.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...will make an OS that uses the four corners of the display.
It's called Expose, and the corner-sensitive feature is activated through System Preferences.
http://www.symphonyos.com/
Windows does use one of the corners at least. If you go to the bottom left and click (well, if that's where your start menu is), it will click the start button (even though it's really a few pixels off).
My primary peeve with any Windows interface is when I ask the Taskbar to hide I have no ability to change the delay which makes it reappear.
.5-1.0 seconds, it would make me a happy guy. But since I can't, I put it at the bottom and leave it un-hid.
I'd love to have it on the side of the desktop but when I do, it reappears all the time when I am sliding to the File menu or to the Close box.
Heck, the same thing happens on the bottom or top of the screen - if I hide it at bottom of the screen and I slide the cursor down to the lower edge of a window to make it smaller... the darn Taskbar appears!
If I could set the Taskbar reappearance to occur only after a delay of
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Well, anything that modifies its own code on the fly sorta should live in separate instances. Of course if your doing this in multiple instances, you're probably into automata, and then it's not really a big issue, because then you probably want a bunch of them umbrellad by same controller process anyway. In fact, its probably worth the performance hit to emulate each of them in it's own world anyway.