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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'. "
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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.
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.
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)
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'?
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
...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.
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.
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?"
I can't wait to see *his* UI design that addresses all these concerns.