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)
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
I really fucking hate how every program you install nowadays has some kind of agent running in the background on startup. What's worse is that a lot of new programs make it impossible to disable them.
You know what? I'll decide when I want a certain program running on my computer, thank you very much!
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.
I also agree with the blog, too many preferences and too many flashing notification everywhere are very distracting. GNOME I think is on the right track with this, especially in the Ubuntu distro version. Applications are simple and streamlined.
Today most computer users are all tainted by MS Windowz interface, that is what they know and they won't learn anything different even if it means improved usability and efficiency in the future. Therefore there are two philosophies for designing new interfaces:
1) Design what is familiar to the users even if it considered "bad design" according to standards and HCI research
2) Design what is believed to be correct according to HCI research, even at the expense of confusing the Windowz crowd.
It seems that KDE has mostly addopted the first approach and GNOME the second.
An interesting point, in one of the HCI classes I took, we read a paper that compared the command line to the graphical point-n-click interface. It turns out users are slower to learn the commands but once they do they remember them longer. For example it might take a while for my grandpa to learn that 'ls' means 'list the files in the directory' as opposed to just double-clicking the folder. But once he will learn it he will know it for a longer time, as opposed to asking him to open a folder in windowz a week later -- he might try to click on it once, click with a wrong button or try a mouse gesture.
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.