A New Paradigm For Web Browsing

dsaci points out a New York Times article about how surfing the web may change to a more graphics-based endeavor. With the advent of devices like the Wii and the iPhone, the capability to directly control objects on a screen is becoming a popular and affordable technology. That, combined with immersive interfaces such as Piclens, could be the future of web browsing. Quoting: "'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,' said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. 'People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.' Voice, too, is finally beginning to play a significant role as an interface tool in a new generation of consumer-oriented wireless handsets. Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.'s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens."

Comments

Yeah good luck with that

[Gothmolly]

Dragon on a reasonably powerful PC might work, but until you can nail 110% correct recognition, in a crowded area, in a shitty little mic on a 400 MHz ARM processor, don't bother. You don't want to start arguing with your PocketPC about traffic and directions: No, I said Springfield, not Slingblade! *crash*

The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[calebt3]

Giving the computer bad instructions != the computer misunderstanding those instrutions.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[ShieldW0lf]

Aside from that, for someone who is competent it's faster to type than it is to speak, and it's much faster to twitch your hand half an inch than it is to wave it around touching the screen.

Everything outlined in the article is leading away from integrating technology into your core capacities. It's about taking a tool and turning into a third party agent that you need to interact with as though it were some sort of person.

Making a more efficient computer interface means making the muscle movements involved more subtle, not replacing what efficiencies we have with new paradigms that require gross muscle movements and voice strain.

Integrating mouse gestures into the operating system and and moving to one-handed chording keyboards as a standard would be the right direction.

If the brainless masses want Fisher-Price toys, fine. But lets not pretend that Fisher-Price make better tools.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[smallfries]

There is a more general lesson here. When someone comes out of the workwork and says: "Look I've invented a new type of input device" then generally it will be interesting regardless of how well it works. When someone tries to flog the same dead horse that hasn't worked for twenty years then you know that it will suffer all the same failures. I'm sure everyone in this crowd has used voice activated interfaces and knows just how much they suck.

When a business analyst / investment "consultant" starts hyping up marginal advances as revolutionary and talking about coming "paradigm shifts" then you know that the bullshit is in full flow. Accelerometer interfaces are nice, they do feel more natural - I worked on one for an educational games project seven years ago. But the key point that you've captured is they are intrusive. Until the accuracy is high enough that we can make a twitch interface they are not a replacement for the traditional tools of mouse and keyboard.

What really pissed me off about the article was the insistence that these interfaces were a "direct manipulation" of images on screen. No, if you reach in and move an image (somehow) then that would be direct manipulation. If your physical gestures are translated into screen motion by accelerometers rather than a mouse then it is still an indirect interface. It is at most a minor increment on the user interface technology that we have already, the term "Paradigm Shift" is thrown about with abandon by too many suits without a understanding of what it implies.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[Fred_A]

"Thanks, you've illustrated my point perfectly."

Glad to be of service, but I'd rather use simple voice commands to control a portable device. My cellphone has the ability to dial by voice, recognizing both names and numbers. It's not perfect, but it is usually faster than typing or searching for contacts.

Voice control and other methods are only infants compared to keyboards, but just like the keyboard improved from a mechanical device on a typewriter into a simple multi-function electronic device, other input technologies will improve.

I'm just looking forward to the day when the computer interfaces with my brain and provides all inputs so that I can just lie in some tube and experience the reality that the computer determines is best for me.

Where did I read
"Text-based interfaces have proven that most users can't read.
Graphic interfaces have proven that most users can't understand abstractions.
Mind reading interfaces will prove that most users can't think."

I have little doubt that it will happen that way.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[Original Replica]

rather than dwell on how glossy and cool our phones look.

I think that "glossy and cool" is the aspect that will win the day for voice recognition in phones. Usable keypads have a minimum size, and that size is too large to look good in the pocket of a pair of tailored pants or a suit jacket. It will be a simple matter for marketing to make having a Blackberry "brick" clipped to your belt passé. This isn't a concern for much of the Slashdot crowd, but it will be a driving factor for a significant portion of the market.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[arth1]

On Vista saying "open notepad" is much faster than trying to remember where it is buried on the menu.

In Windows 2000, it isn't. What's changed is added bells and whistles to the start menu, as well as an artificial delay (presumably to help those who aren't good at quickly and correctly moving the pointer). With Windows XP, the "dynamic" menu was also introduced, making the menu in its default setting hide what you haven't used recently, and at the same time preventing any kind of spatial memorization of where to find things -- it can and will change. With Windows Vista, there's a huge big mess of trying to replace menus with predictive breadcrumbs (yet another way to prevent spatial memory), and some of these design choices have even hit the innocent start menu. To the point that it now /is/ very slow.
That doesn't mean having menus is the slow choice.

And it's a hell of a lot faster than repeating yourself multiple times, or having to use a menu /anyhow/, because it's too noisy for voice control where you are, or you have to be quiet.

What's needed, IMO, is a simplification of the UI, focusing on simplicity and consistency, and not done by trying to second-guess the user or provide a more "natural feeling". Saying "Enhance 224 to 176. Stop" might work in a movie, but in real life, it's by far easier to drag a mouse box over an area.

Anecdotes have it that the tree most common words said on voice operated telephone menus are "no", "dammit" and "operator".

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[jay-za]

That sounds like a feature, unless you're one of those people who grows desperately frantic at the notion that you might be unreachable at any single point in your life.

You missed option (c). One of those people who's BOSS grows desperately frantic at the notion that I might be unreachable at any single point in my life. In those days (a full 2 years back :-) I was a technical contractor, and if my boss didn't know where I was for 30 minutes he'd phone and ask.

It would be even worse these days, though. As IS manager I'm responsible for everything that goes wrong at the office (a part of the job description I missed during the interview stage), and I would rather have my techs contact me when there's a problem, than walk into an ambush the next morning when I didn't know something had happenned. It may sound inane, but a simple problem like "Director X' home ADSL stopped working" can get escalated to "all Internet traffic, including traffic to that new and important project, dropped for half the day yesterday and no-one knew what to do about it" if I'm no able to babysit the problem, smooth the egos and make sure that no one over reacts.

Anyone know of a senior position in the IS industry where that isn't the case and I'll be glad to submit my CV. It's actually situations like that one that have made we consider giving up computers and taking up farming. The hours are easier and it's more predictable.

(That last comment was humour. It's funny, laugh. But don't mod me +1 funny, choose something else, I need the karma ;-)

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[Metasquares]

I realize you were joking, but as the poster said, you illustrated his point: let's say you wanted to dictate that response. Those aren't words, so how do you do it?

"T". "y". "e". "s"....

*5 minutes later*

"o". "f". "o". "Period".

No matter how fast the system responds, you can probably type the letters faster than you can dictate them. Similar things would happen when dealing with non-natural languages, such as programming languages. Can you imagine trying to dictate a regular expression? :)

A voice is a wonderful thing, but we should probably acknowledge that it's not always the most appropriate input method for the job. In some scenarios, such as writing a lengthy Word document or transcribing meeting minutes, dictation offers great promise (if we can ensure a high degree of accuracy), but it is virtually useless in others.

Re:Yeah good luck with that

[Jesus_666]

"New" doesn't always equate to "good". It doesn't always equate to "bad", either.

I agree that touch interfaces, for example, are nice for small devices (even though they mean you get fingerprints all over your nice, shiny display), but they don't work too well for a 21" flatscreen display because the amount of arm movement would be tiring after a while. They also can't really replace a keyboard in terms of tactile response and typing speed (as many fast typists actually hit one key before releasing the last). Like every technology they work well in some cases and less well in others.

Likewise, voice commands are nice in a somewhat quiet room where you can afford to talk with a normal voice. They also work well if you're talking into a mobile phone right next to your mouth. But in a very noisy environment or a library they work less well, especially when you're using a notebook and the microphone is about one meter away from your mouth. They also lend themselves much better to issuing simple commands (where the recognition software has to classify them into a small set of classes) than to dictating sourcecode. Again, whether or not they make sense depends entirely on the circumstances.

Visually impaired ignored?

[cojsl]

Hopefully "they" also develop good image to speech technologies, or are they forgetting that there are many visually impaired Internet users?

Extension?

[calebt3]

People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind You mean it isn't?
...
...
Wow! I just discovered that my hand and my mouse are not one unit after all!

Doesn't bother me

[nizo]

As long as the extra flashy junk doesn't impede my ability to get useful information from a website, I will be fine with it. There have been so many sites that don't seem to understand this though (yahoo maps is a great example, among many many sites. The original "low bandwidth" version is still more useful than their "new bling improved" version, even over a high speed connection). Ebay is headed down the path of "bling overload" too. What bothers me is when a site adds rotating blinking things without considering, "what improvements does this give us or the user trying to use our website?"

Not only that

[dreamchaser]

I certainly don't want to be on a bus or plane with dozens of people all yakking commands to their devices, nor do I necessarily want to display to the world what commands I am giving to my device. Voice control is nice in certain circumstances, but until they give me a direct neural interface I want keys and/or stylus and/or cursor control and input options.

Voice is too slow

[Mprx]

I can think faster than I can speak unambiguous commands. Using a combination of keyboard shortcuts, extended mouse buttons and mouse gestures I can browse fast enough that the bottleneck is almost always reading comprehension. This is also much less tiring than speaking. A better solution might be a combination of eye tracking and brainwave monitoring, but that's still far too unreliable.

Re:Voice is too slow

[MyNameIsFred]

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is my biggest complaint about voice control. It is slower than keyboard and mouse. For example, when selecting text on a page, it is much faster to point and click then to say select "select tenth line down." If for no other no other reason than I had to count the lines to know to select the tenth one. We see this everyday when we talk to people. A large part of the conversation involves hand gestures, head nods, etc. People say "look and this," and then point to the object. Just try having a conversation without using your hands, head nods, etc. Its slower, and much more verbose.

Interaction Language...

[krahd]

"'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,'
OK, playing a little devil's advocate here. Perhaps the building bricks of computer interfaces and their basic interaction mechanics haven't changed because they are all right as they are now.
We have developed an interaction language that allows us to express interaction proposals and allows the users to understand those proposals and, therefore, to interact successfully with our systems. Why should we change that if it is working?

Change for change's sake, when we have an established language does not sound sound... I don't see no one complaining that we've been calling chairs "chairs" for so many years...

Re:Interaction Language...

[Jasin Natael]

I'll partially rebut you both. I think that his question includes its own answer. The interfaces are supposed to be an extension of our minds, right? Well, 30 years ago when the first WIMP-y interfaces were developed, the closest we could get was to approximate things that our brain had developed to interact with.

Our brains are perhaps the most plastic knowledge-based system we currently know of. Over those twenty years of widespread use, our minds have become accustomed to the interfaces available. We expect everything to adhere to that interface model, both good and bad. Why do you think so many people seek out Windows (and Windows Mobile, for crying out loud!)? Why would anyone want XP on a UMPC? People want the quirks and inconsistencies they've become familiar with. Product quality or fitness to a purpose has very little to do with this kind of decision.

I think the resurgence of interface innovation is because we've recently gotten used to computing for leisure and fun. Most people wouldn't play around with unfamiliar, quirky, or bare-bones interfaces when there's work to be done, and I can't imagine their bosses would be happy if the a minor version software upgrade required retraining from scratch. This is where your above argument comes into play. But the general public is starting to use computers for leisure and socialization, and as an end in and of themselves. And this gives people time, opportunity, and a comfortable setting in which to use new interfaces.

We should change the interfaces because the new ones are better. If you want to write the bible for the Church of 70's Interface Design, and indoctrinate acolytes to protect the faith, realize that this is dogma, and nothing more. It's as useless to our progress as any other, and a straw man in any case. No-one is advocating the introduction of less efficient interfaces, or change for change's sake.

voice control

[theheadlessrabbit]

voice recognition as it is today is painful.

"Computer, start, programs, Mozilla, fire fox , double you, double you, double you, dot, google, dot, com, search field, violent, asian, porn. I'm feeling lucky. click"

its a slow, painful, annoying as hell process that brings you back to the keyboard and mouse once the novelty has worn off, and only leaves the user feeling ripped off for wasting so much money on a fancy new inferior interface.

voice recognition won't be useful until it is intelligent. I should only have to say "Computer, google porn" and get my results. I shouldn't have to explain to my computer step by step how to open a freaken browser.

Re:voice control

[calebt3]

And then there is entering /.'s URL.

Here's an exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an exercise for those who believe voice commands are the way to go for small electronics. Every time you use your cell phone, iPod, PDA or GPS, say each command out loud before entering it. See if you can keep this up for a full day.

Privacy and voice command

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate the privacy the keyboard, mouse provides when "talking" to my computer.

I would really hate if I could hear every single command that other people in the office, on the subway, in a coffee shop would say to their computers, laptops.

handicapped accessiblity, localization

[ml10422]

For the software I work on, handicapped accessibility is one of the factors that keeps our UI choices conservative. Screen readers, high-contract color schemes, etc. are all heavily dependent on the current GUI model, especially menus. And we have to cover handicapped accessibility to make government sales.

Also, localization requirements often keep us from doing some bold new UI experiment.

He wondered for a long time why...

[TransEurope]

It's because it works like it is. And the "new" ways of controlling aren't advantages, they are just ways of fixing the disadvantages of small displays and small devices lacking (working!) methods of cotrolling like mouses, trackballs and so on.

Re:Yeah, okay, sure... You go first.

[Haeleth]

The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on /. command line is king)

Even command-line users pretty much all run their terminals under a windowing system these days. Even if they use traditional editors like emacs and vi, most people default to using versions of those that take advantage of the features that GUI environments provide. And how many people do you think browse Slashdot from the command-line? Methinks the number is small.

So I think it's safe to say that the number of people who do not see any benefit from graphical windowed environments is infinitesimally small, even among hardcore *nix hacker types.

but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years.

How old are mouse gestures, out of interest? Most people who use them seem to think they're a step forward, and they've only been a mainstream concept for a few years, though I'm sure they've existed for far longer than that as a research concept or whatever.

more like a tool

[radarsat1]

'People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.'

I wish people could learn to think of their computers more as "just a tool". Half the time I see people having problems with computer usage, it's because they're expecting the thing to read their mind. I have to explain to them just how dumb a computer is, and that you really have to tell it what to do because it's just a machine.

(The other half, of course, is due to shitty software.)

Baby steps first, then worry about how to best run

[dissy]

Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.'s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens." Despite the fact most of us are extremely faster at typing than 'hunt and pecking', even the slowest hunt and pecker is going to be exponentially more accurate at input with a keyboard than even the best voice recognition software in existence today.

Voice recognition still sucks badly, even after a lot of time investment into it.
Maybe if someone got around to fixing that somehow, then we would consider, you know, using it.
I'm not at all suggesting we give up that line of research, just suggesting we put the horse before the cart here.

Or at least don't lie and say "will quickly give way to voice commands" and call it what it is. Those people want it to happen, and there is nothing wrong with that! Each tech has people that would prefer it over others. To each their own!
But to out right lie and say that it will happen 'quickly' is just embarrassing for your career as a technologist.

Re:We'll see

[Steve001]

I think one of the hinderances to practical voice recognition has been the telephone paradigm (described in the book "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte) where the computer is supposed to understand anything that anyone says at any time. What might work for voice recognition is for the user to have a custom chip that will allow a device to be configured to understand that specific user. Move the chip to a new device and that device will understand you perfectly.

What might also work is if the user trains himself/herself to speak in a way that the computer can consistently recognize, much like the user of Palm's Graffiti handwriting system learned to write in a way that the PDA could consistenly understand. With training, speaking that would could become second nature, much like typing has become for many users.

Long Way to Go

[Starky]

I use a Windows Mobile device. Involuntarily. Aside from my other beefs (the biggest of which is that they do not support anything other than Outlook to sync ... I am indescribably perturbed by that "feature"), the voice recognition software is completely useless.

Sitting alone in a room with no background noise whatsoever, speaking as clearly as an evening news anchor, I get about a 5-10% success rate.

If that's the best voice recognition out there for mobile devices at the moment, it's got a very long way to go before it could be useful for Joe Average.

Dear Austin Dickwad....

[pandrijeczko]

...You may have such an empty shell of a life that the only time you feel important is when you're connected to the Internet and therefore feel the need to impose those ideals on everyone else on the basis that you're also so self-conscious that you dare not stand out from the rest of the sheeple.

As for me? In my mid-40s now, I was born into the age of home computing, ZX Spectrums and Manic Miner, man walking on the moon, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, the birth of the Internet, Web and Linux. I love the Internet, I spend more time computing than watching TV these days, these are great times.

But I am NOT and NEVER WILL BE some soulless idiot who needs to spend his entire life peering into some huge or tiny computer screen never looking up to see what's happening in the real world. There are too many interesting REAL people to meet, too many good foods and wines to savour (preferably with some of those interesting real people), too much good music to listen to, to many books to read while laying on a sandy beach, etc. etc.

If you want to turn YOUR life into an extension of the Internet (or whatever it is you're wittering on about) then go do it. But then I hope in your case there is no afterlife that gives you the opportunity to look back upon that empty shell of a life you had to give you the chance to regret wasting it away.

Computers, phones, MP3 players, etc. etc. are FANTASTIC TOOLS for work, socialising and entertainment, no question about it. But they are there to ENHANCE our modern lives, not OWN them!

Re:Yeah, okay, sure... You go first.

[Asic Eng]

What especially annoys me is stuff like this; ... will quickly give way to voice commands ... How long have people been claiming this now? Not sure if it's been quite 20 years or just 15. Be that as it may: for most applications voice input is a stupid idea. It hasn't become widespread in all these years because nobody likes to use it, and there is no reason to expect that to change.

Simple answer

[glwtta]

I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago

Because it works.

Whereas all the attempts at shifting the paradigms to an extension of your soul (or whatever), just result in unusable exercises in masturbation (and not the kind the internet was invented for).

Remember how Flash was going to be the future of the web? Yeah.

What about the icon-impaired?

[pongo000]

I'm icon-impaired. Seriously. My mind cannot make the subconscious connection between an icon or graphic and what said graphic is supposed to represent. Over the years, I've forced myself to recognize a floppy disk as "save," and a printer as "print". The rest mean nothing to me. When I use OpenOffice or any other graphic-intensive program, I must either (1) memorize various keyboard shortcuts, or (2) hover over the toolbar icons to find the one I want. For obvious reasons, my editor of choice is one that doesn't require me to decode icons. Nearly every graphical "decode" operation requires conscious thought as well as a process of elimination to narrow down the choices to a set of possibilities from which I will (hopefully) select the correct one. Many times I'm wrong.

Almost everything I do is on the CLI. I've been programming for nearly two decades, and I have no problems selecting textual tokens out of a field of similar-looking text. But give me a set of small, information-deprived graphics to decode, and I fall flat on my face.

I can't be alone in this. Surely others have this same cognitive disability.

Re:Touch screens are the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I can't stand touch-screens. More often than not you end up typing on some fake keyboard, with zero tactile response, and awkward hand positioning. The few things that a touch screen could be considered "better" at than a keyboard/mouse combo is icon-clicking, and even then, I prefer to just move my wrist an inch or two, or better yet, just move my finger a bit (with a trackball) than wave my arm around like an idiot to go from one side of my monitor to the other.

Oh, and I like my screen to be clean, rather than some oily, filthy, smudged, greasy nasty mess that any "touch screen" ends up being. I have a hard enough time keeping the screen on my cellphone clean after having it only brush against my face while talking, the last thing I want is to have to rub my fingers all over the screen just to use it.

Lets also think about the first major implementation for touch-screens...the registers at McDonalds and other fast-food joints. Now we all know how intelligent the high-school dropouts working there are, so yes, having a computer where you only have to touch the picture of what you want would help them, and I suppose the likely target-audience for touch-screen devices and iPhones is people also possessing intelligences rivaling those of fast-food register jockeys.

Throwing accessibility

[Vexorian]

Throwing accessibility and portability out of the window in favor of coolness, that's got to work, right?

The good news is that after this catastrophic mistake, 2018 will bring talks about the novel concepts of accessibility and portability of web pages, we might even end up creating a consortium to promote web standards that will allow you to, in theory see a page correctly in different devices and software without caring about silly things like multimedia support, fonts, current resolution in use, etc.