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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.
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.
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.
... 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)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
A Rant without viable alternatives is a waste of space.
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.
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?)
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.
What's that?
He's just ignorantly bitching?
Oh...
This sig rocks the casbah.
Actually, you can do that in Windows. If you do search for files, you can select the files in the results page, and do any sort of action you would do to typical files. I use this to remove entries from lists of e-mail addresses when they change - I do a search on a given location (recursively) for a certain pattern, and when the results appear, I select the search results, and drag it onto the vim icon. I then do a little bit of editing magic in vim, and it's all done. If I was doing it on my own workstation, I'd probably just do it with perl/awk/sed via cygwin, but the machine I'm working on doesn't have very many goodies on it. :-/
:D
There's no doubt in my mind that a shell is the fastest way to get most things done, but unfortunately, the majority of people refuse to learn how to do things efficiently, and want a dumbed down interface for everything. The trick is to learn the best way to use the available tools, and hope to get somewhere near the efficiency of a CLI.
*sigh* Only ~>2 hours before I can return to my *nix boxen at home.
"Interfaces suck because they don't read my mind."
That's what a college education will buy you.
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.
From TFA:
This guy's obviously never used Symphony OS.
---
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.
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.
thatthingisuselessImgoingtoquitusingitfromnowon
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
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
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.
- 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.