Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Human-Computer Interaction
ChelleChelle writes "Starting with the Xerox Alto and the Star, ACM Queue briefly covers the history of human-computer interaction from past to present. It doesn't stop there, however. Using a hypothetical situation involving context-awareness in cellphones, the author lays out his thoughts on the future of HCI, offering opinions, advice, and examples."
Most of mine consists of:
And that's usually on a pretty good day. Right now I'm experiencing a lot more gremlins than usual.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I work at a worldwide software engineering company. We recently had a programmer from China visit to learn how to implement our system over there. He spoke fairly poor English yet when asked how he was coping he replied- :D
Oh i understand ok, it's all computer terms seperated by swear words, same as back home.
I was surprised by this:
"Smart-phone sales are about 15 percent of the market now (around 100 million units), but with their faster growth should outnumber PCs by 2008."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The mouse in its current form is about to be rendered obsolete. With XGL, Quartz3D, AeroGlass, and Looking Glass, we are most assuredly moving twoards fully-3d computer enviroments. As the mouse only moves in two dimensions, it will be time for some change. The Wiimote is perfect for a 3d enviroment. It also has very little learning curve (as much as the adjustment to 3d will have, anyway).
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Wanna kill all humans?
That was about the only useful information I got FTA.
Now off to go and steal some artworks...
Unfortunately what *I* seem to see is the stealing of a lot of ideas which really don't have that much day-to-day value OR are really bad, annoying ideas. Whereas really good ideas seem to have been lost.
I really couldn't give a care about a 3D desktop or pretty icons. I really want to know why the heck some task keeps dying and what I can do about it. (In *nix operating systems this is usually pretty easily sorted, but with Windows I don't have clue number 1 unless I get one of those An error occured. [Send it] [Cancel] requestors. Where's the log on this alleged operating system?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
# wtf? stupid humans!
# You #&%*!! humans!
# #$*@ %&*@!! humans!!!
# $$&*^ piece of $*&^#@! human!!
# Dropped battery again? You #&^%*@ *#&%&@ pile of $&^@#! human!
# [Fist on human's head] NO! That's not what I meant!
# [Human against wall] &#%*#$@ you God!
I participated in a study done at..a major research lab..that studied the future of speech as a computer interface. The study was done in such a way as to ignore technology limitations and assume a perfectly working speech and AI system. The conclusion of this study was that speech was not a very good interface for most applications, and would remain a niche forever. The gist was that other modalities, most notably direct manipulation, had less cogntive load, lower latencies,caused less cognitive dissonance, and incited less social friction (eg there is a reason people text message on their phones) compared to speech.
As you might expect, these results were never published, but instead replaced by another more..paycheck oriented..paper that extolled the bright future of speech interfaces.
This article is very similar to the researcher-paycheck oriented paper. It appeals to anecdotal fantasies about technology that don't actually work well in reality. Think about the location context phone for example; their example sounds nice but is it really useful? How many people walking around San Francisco would actually be helped by a "dinner,taxi rapid transit" menu on their cell phone? Even if it was useful in theory, in practice that list would simply be more advertising spam intruding into your life.
Will the future of HCI
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Next
be a bunch of dialogs
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or will it be one page?
Next
Ahh, here we go:
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&
I abuse commas, I cannot help myself.
Until recently there was no rigorous metric for the power of a natural language understanding system but that has changed with The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Since the introduction of the Hutter Prize here at Slashdot there has already been as much progress as ordinarily occurs in a year (actually a bit more since an average year progresses 3% in compression of natural language and the current contestants may have already achieved 4% improvement since the /. announcement).
The theory is simple enough and the mathematical proof has been done: If you can sufficiently compress a large, general knowledge natural langage corpus like Wikipedia, you can competently articulate and understand natural language.
It's a hard problem but with the metric and the prize competition driving progress there's a good chance human-level understanding of natural language will start to emerge within the next few years.
BTW: This revolutionizes software development in more ways than one. Think about it like this: When Alan Kay first dreamt of Smalltalk, he was dreaming of a system anyone could program. Well, if you can just say what you want and the system is good enough at comprehending you, program specification just became very natural -- natural enough that you child could perform feats of programming not practical with corporate teams of software developers before.
Seastead this.
I'm fed up with people misquoting that Picaso line. What he actually said was this:
(HTML used for emphasis)
They were two unrelated statements that happened to be said at the same time. Picaso wasn't talking about internalization, plagiarism, or even art theft. Picaso wasn't talking specifically about the every-day kind of theft cat burglars and shoplifters are prosecuted for, either (though it does help maintain credibility to keep a criminal record). Picaso was talking about hucksters and grifters, about con-artists and the IRS: people who convince others to hand over money and offer little in return. A piece of paper that's already got some scribbles on it, some canvas that's already been spoiled, a CD that's filled with 48 minutes of senseless noise. Picaso knew something true artists should never forget: real art is in the money. Anyone can splash a few blobs of paint on a canvas and claim it worthy of wall space. If you can convince someone else it's worthy of their wallspace, though... if you can convince them to pay you thousands of dollars for something that took you 25 minutes and three cans of Dulux... then you are an artist. Not before.
Great artists steal our pocketbook lining, and the pocketbook linings of one another. Don't be fooled by this deceptive philosophy called art, and don't set foot into its seedy underworld. It is criminal stuff; an artist-eat-artist mire of corruption. The RIAA treats artists as the American Mafia treats store owners through protection rackets. Universal/EMG, Sony/BMG, WB treat artists as pimps treat their hos, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (arguably the finest, most critically acclaimed artists since N*Sync) treat one another as fighting cocks.
Mothers, tell your sons to choose lawyering, life, love, and any of the fine sciences over this corrupt influence we call "art".
This is The Voice Of Fate signing off. Have a Pleasant Evening.
Most of the new and upcoming technology that people *like* to talk about, is all the fluff. This is what marketing executives use to sell their products. The reality is that it amounts to nothing more than eye candy. People are attracted by good looking things and great sounding features, but ultimatley stay with something because of ease of use and performance.
People appreciate things that look nice, like buying a new car...if it is a really great looking car, it is great for the first week, but if it is slow, drives like a dog and guzzles the fuel (a little heavy on the resources me thinks...) then ultimatley you end up hating the car, and if there are better options available you tend to go and find something better, because ultimatley we derive more satisfaction from a car that performs well....looks alone do not do it.
Too much candy will give you a fat head. People are initially drawn into things that look nice because they are visually appealing and easy to figure out how to use. But once you know how to use it, you then want to cut the bull and find out the fastest and easiest way to do it.
Hard work is just an accumulation of the easy things that you didn't do when you should have.
When you enable P2P file-sharing, you enable communism. Yet worse violators of law are those who hand money to The Russian Threat: "allmusic.com" If we don't want yet another Cold War, I suggest something be done about this site before more Sony/BMG producers are found starved to death.
England Prevails
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
*Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it*
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
If you're writing software, but don't feel competent to have an informed opinion about HCI-related topics, you need to read up on the topic.
:)
And I'm not just talking about UIs and user-facing stuff, either. I work on a backend storage system. I have a web browser, a front-end server, and a middle-tier server seperating my back-end servers from my end-users, and I still feel that having taken a cogsci class that presented HCI principles well has been invaluable to my job. Examples include solid API design for the middle-tier folks, and designing fault-evident test automation.
If a human isn't consuming your code in some way, you probably aren't getting paid.
At a minimum, I think every programmer should read The Design of Everyday Things. It doesn't talk much about code, but the lessons are 100% applicable.
I'd say the next major leap in human-computer interface will most likely involve us boning our computers.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
I'm certain it was posted here before for some other article, but I fail to see posts for this article that link to this?
Multi-touch interface is where it's at - personally, I wouldn't want to talk to my computer to get it to do something. The processing power can be put to much better use calculating a cure to cancer. Plus, it's an annoyance to everyone around, sure, it's cool in that Star Trek kind of way, but for constant use? No way man. It would suck having to tell your computer what to do - really.
Think about it, late at night, you want the computer to do something: "Find me porn" "Honey? What are you doing?", uh, yeah, that's not gonna fly.
Playing games: "shoot that creature there! Damnit! This is much too slow!".
Or programming: "int main bracket argh.. no. Delete. No. Delete del- ah screw it."
Or word processing: "Dear mom, fix aunt, delete that, delete that, delete that, select all, I think it's picking, I think it's picking up a bit of echo here, delete- select all" yeah, no. I think I'll stick with my multi-touch interface.
Multi-touch is completely natural and virtually no learning curve. We all have fingers or limbs, or feet, or noses or whatever else with which you use to interact with things - multi-touch interface takes that into account. Plus, information has traditionally been shown on a screen. How often do you hear the story of the newb trying to use the screen as a touch interface?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni