The Future & History of the User Interface

An anonymous reader writes "The Mac Observer is taking a look at UI development with lots of video links to some of the latest developments in user interfaces. It also has links to some of the most interesting historical footage of UI developments, here's one of the 1968 NLS demo. From the article: 'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses... It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"

Comments

Overlapping windows

[Peaker]

Heh, the issue of User Interfaces always makes me laugh at the incompetence of seemingly the entire world when it comes to User Interfaces (or the whole computing world in general).

Some obvious trivial faults:

1. The whole overlapping window model is bankrupt. You want to minimize the amount of information, especially redundant information, that the user has to input, and output as much information in an accessible way. The overlapping window model does the opposite: it requires that you tile your windows manually (or through tedious, inaccessible menus) rather than specifying which windows you want to see. If you don't do that (and due to the required effort, most don't) then you don't see all of the information you want even though most of the screen is wasted space!.
   For reference, just look at your screen now, and watch how much of it is covered by empty "gray areas". When you open a new window, does it hide gray areas, or real information?
   This is even more absurd when there are just a couple of windows, hiding each other, when the entire screen is free space! The computer expects YOU to work for HIM and move these windows from hiding each other.
   This phonemenon is also felt in list boxes, where you are expected to adjust the column widths manually to not be too short/too long, even when there is an optimal adjustment readily available. You again have to work for the computer, and ask for a ctrl+plus to set it up. Most people don't even know about ctrl+plus in column-listboxes.
   Some programs make it even worse, and don't let you resize their windows when the entire screen is free, and you have to scroll through their data in a little window.
   
2. Internationalization and shortcut keys.
   What's so fascinating about this example - is how common it is across platforms, programs, operating systems.
   The feature is called "shortcut keys" and yet everyone is implementing it as "shortcut symbols".
   This is terrible - when you switch between languages, all shortcut keys break!
   
3. Multitude of widgets, with overlapping functionalities. This is just silly and confusing to beginners. We need less widgets, not more.
   
4. "Jumpyness". Today's GUI's all "jump". What I mean by that is that they don't smoothly switch from one state to the next, but rather do that with a single screen refresh. The human mind doesn't read that very well. For example, scrolling down "jumps" down a pageful instead of scrolling down a pageful in a smooth motion.
   The fact that fixing this would require modifications of all existing GUI programs is a certificate of poor architecture of GUI software.
   

There are many more trivial issues to fix. Until they fix these, I find it very funny to talk about future directions for the User Interface. We haven't even gotten the basics right yet!

Re:Overlapping windows

[CaptainCarrot]

I disagree.

1. Overlapping windows are used to make more information available to the user than can be displayed on the available screen real estate. The RL metaphor is a collection of papers on a desk. You can't see every paper all at once, but you bring to the top of the pile those which you need. You do this for your own benefit, based on the needs of the moment, not for that of the desk -- or the computer. The whole point is that the space isn't tiled. I don't like working that way personally, and I suspect the reason we've moved away from that model is because most people don't. Remember the early Windows versions?

   You asked how much of the screen was empty space and therefore wasted? Very little of it, most likely. Very little of mine is as I type. Space with no content in it is not necessarily wasted. In fact, it most likely isn't. Space is crucial to how our brains orgainize what we see. If every square inch of space on the screen was being used, we'd see it as a jumbled mess. The best and most eye-pleasing data presentation use of designs very carefully balance empty space against that occupied by content. Take, for example, your original post against my reply. See how I create spaces between my paragraphs with properly structured P tags? See how much more readable that is?

   I agree that some programs are badly designed and make poor use of the model. That doesn't mean the model itself is broken.

   Yes, it would be nice for those very particular about their screen arrangements if they could save state between sessions and recover it immediately when they start back up again. This is an implementation issue 00 remembering, of course, that most people prefer not to tile.

2. Yes they're shortcut symbols really, but people have a hard time remembering arbitrary symbols. That's why we employ mnemonics, which naturally relate to the language of the interface. For example, it's easy to remember the shortcut to open a file in most word processors (ctrl-O) because "O" is the first letter in the word "open". It's not reasonable to expect such mnemonics, input through an alphanumeric keyboard, to work any other way -- unless you can think of a better one where alphanumeric input is both easy to remember and language-independent. Good luck.
3. This is not an inherent fault in the model, but is a failure across an industry to standardize. In my own GUI design work in Motif, this is why I use the default behavior of the default widget set as much as possible. The users most often know exactly what to expect then.
4. I remember when some word processors and the like included a "smooth scrolling" option. No one used it. It turned out that most people wanted the screen to scroll quickly instead.

The Future is easy to predict here.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the long term, we'll be communicating with computers the same way we communicate with our pets, kids, and coworkers - with a combination of body language, voice, gestures, etc.

In the short term, we'll see Longhorn slowly and sloppily copy whatever Apple's doing; and we'll see KDE and Gnome both copying the bad parts of what the Gnome and KDE are doing respectively; and we'll see all real computer users using emacs/vi/pine/xterm/screen like they always did.

Nobody's paying attention

[quokkapox]

At least not to common consumer devices. I cannot even count the number of remote controls, microwaves, cellphones, dishwashers, ATMs, and other devices which are seem to be designed completely without thought for the human who will need to use them.

Remote controls - ever heard of making the buttons distinguishable by FEEL, so I don't have to look down to tell whether I'm going to change the volume or accidentally change the channel or stop recording?

Microwaves - make the buttons we use all the time bigger and obvious. I can't use my microwave oven in near dark because the stupid thing's start button is indistinguishable from the power level button. That's just dumb. I don't need two different buttons that say "Fresh vegetable" and "Frozen vegetable" which I never use; and I have to babysit the popcorn anyway, so I don't need a "popcorn" button hardcoded for some random time limit. A microwave should have a keypad for entering time and bigger buttons labeled +1minute, +10seconds, ON, and OFF. That's all 99% of people use anyway.

The people who design interfaces should be made to use them for long enough so that they work out at least the most obvious design flaws.

I keep putting off buying a new cellphone because I know I will have to learn a new interface even to set the freaking alarm clock and it will probably take six menu choices to do it.