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'. "

Comments

computers: still not for lay people

[yagu]

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:

1. In Windows I always define my task bar to autohide. Typically I have it to the side of the screen, wide enough so when I mouse over it pops out wide enough for meaningful text to show what tasks really are. But it drives me freaking crazy when events trigger auto-popout of the task bar, often right under my keyboard, or mouse and I end up typing something, hitting enter and triggering something I didn't want, or just plain obscuring something I'm trying to see. (It's so annoying when the network gets flaky and apps that disconnect and re-connect (gaim, "hello (Picasa)", et. al.) proudly interrupt what you're doing to announce they've reconnected for you. Fuck you. I get it! (I had lunch with a best buddy and complained about that task bar behavior, and asked how to disable it -- figured he'd be the one to ask. He rubbed his chin for a second and said, "Hmmm, that's a good idea, I don't have a clue how to disable that!)
2. Meaningless jargon in messages. (this was addressed in the blog.) I got a worried e-mail from my Mom -- she was trying to start "gaim", and it kept giving her a dialog message, "An instance of gaim is already running". What the fuck? Why do we give computerese like "instance" to lay people? I can think of a few more meaningful messages than that off the top of my head that would let her proceed with confidence.
3. Cutesy tooltips. It's no end annoying when I have new apps installed, and the "START" menu in XP puts up the "new programs installed" tooltip, obscuring the "logoff" or "turn off computer" button I'm really trying to get to.

Yes, we're a LONG way off from interfaces that are easy to use and that make sense to the average user.

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[pla]

Meaningless jargon in messages.

Although a lot of programs may lay it on a tad thick, computer users NEED to learn a bit of jargon if they hope to have any shot of dealing with modern technology.

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...").

The same goes with computers. Your example, of an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do you phrase that better? "GAIM is already running"? Since such errors usually happen when you have a ghost process, I suspect most users would find that even more frustrating (I know how my grandfather would react - "God damn it, if I already had it running I wouldn't have tried to start it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)").

Cutesy tooltips.

I agree 100%... You can actually turn those off, at least the ones that come from Windows itself, but XP has a rather obnoxious bug wherein you will eventually get them back, and can't turn them off again (because you already have them off).



Oh, and your peeve about the task bar - Drives me absolutely batty. To re-quote the grandfather, "God damn it, if I wanted to switch to that window, I'd click on it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)!". :)

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[cbiffle]

The same goes with computers. Your example, of an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do you phrase that better? "GAIM is already running"?

No.

Instead, you pop up the existing GAIM instance.

If the user clicked on the GAIM icon, s/he wanted GAIM. Give them GAIM. The problem in the dialog is a red herring; the problem is in the implementation.

Pet peeves...

[It doesn't come easy]

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 largest key

[Se7enLC]

...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.

Why does /. even link to this?

[ABaumann]

It's a rant on a stupid blog. Slashdot refers to it as an "Editorial"

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. ... See point six." And what's with 8 having no title? Point 8 isn't a point. It's a use case.

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.

Editorial?

[jdog1016]

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.

Nice Rant

[wayne606]

I can't wait to see *his* UI design that addresses all these concerns.