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The Future of UI

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Re: The Future of UI

#51

Post by joelhaus »

hop wrote: post #26
sdfx wrote: post #16

These new UI concepts are always awe inspiring, but what is really the benefit of using them? One of the most popular demonstrations is browsing through a bunch of photos on a huge screen with large gestures. While this looks quite impressive it's inaccurate when performing specific tasks (e.g. the color-selection planes in the video), the gestures are limited and you have to learn somewhat unintuitive ones apart fro…

Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces together and ships a useful product - like the iPad UI... I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would…

Wasn't sure what "Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process" involves; it ends up that the title is pretty self-explanatory:

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, "seven in order to make three look good", which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They'll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

[Source: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...]

Re: The Future of UI

#52

Post by Groxx »

fjabre wrote: post #42

Everybody seems to be stuck on hand gestures and arm movement for the future, but while this looks cool I wonder just how comfortable it is to keep you arms waving about like that for hours on end. Also, it's hard to argue that 3D is always superior to 2D when presenting information. In some cases 2D is more than sufficient. I also wonder why there isn't more talk about Brain–computer interfaces . It seems to me that…

I've generally thought that too, gestures (especially when your arm is involved) are hugely tiring if you have to do them for a long time on anything larger than an iPhone. And 3D imposes extra thinking. Subtle 3D could work - we have minimal already, with layered windows and shadows and "3D buttons" - but nothing drastic.

And my hopes too are for brain interfaces, though I think I've got a pretty good idea of the difficulty inherent in that. I can hope, right?

Re: The Future of UI

#53

Post by euccastro »

bad_user wrote: post #46
DannoHung wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Why did it take so long for touch screen interfaces to become huge when almost everyone loves them? On the other hand, why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system?

> why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system? That's an easy one to answer. It's for the same reason humans developed natural language by sounds emitted by vocal cords, with a pretty simple mechanism ... you've got a vocabulary of words that describe something, like an action, or an attribute or a physical object, and then you can mix them together to form phras…

> there's only so much you can describe with hand gestures without the movements becoming unintuitive.

Even more so for sounds. Most spoken words are no more intuitive than arbitrary gestures in modern gestural languages (which can similarly be articulated in powerful systems just like spoken languages).

Aural, visual, tactile and chemical channels each have advantages and disadvantages for different applications. I'm not convinced intrinsic 'intuitiveness' is one of these factors. In communication, intuition is mostly hardwired convention. Lowering ears and wagging tail has a different (and quite opposite) instinctive meaning for cats and dogs.

Re: The Future of UI

#54

Post by Scriptor »

euccastro wrote: post #53
bad_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system? That's an easy one to answer. It's for the same reason humans developed natural language by sounds emitted by vocal cords, with a pretty simple mechanism ... you've got a vocabulary of words that describe something, like an action, or an attribute or a physical object, and then you can mix them together to form phras…

> there's only so much you can describe with hand gestures without the movements becoming unintuitive. Even more so for sounds. Most spoken words are no more intuitive than arbitrary gestures in modern gestural languages (which can similarly be articulated in powerful systems just like spoken languages). Aural, visual, tactile and chemical channels each have advantages and disadvantages for different applications. I'…

Command-line interfaces seem to involve two main parts. The commands themselves (ls, mv, rm, and so on) and the arbitrary parameters supplied to them (all files with the .txt extension or compiler flags). For the former hand gestures would work well since there is a limited and well-defined set of commands, the latter would be better served with a regular text input. Even here the distinction gets blurred by commands created by applications you install yourself.

A combination of the two with instant switching between the two modes would be nice. But that still seems like an uncreative solution.

Re: The Future of UI

#55

Post by Scriptor »

tgandrews wrote: post #15

The moving physical objects makes sense, touch makes sense. Learning a series of gestures to manipulate data on a screen makes less sense to me than a mouse. The mouse is movement and control, the gestures need you to hold your hands in strange positions and move within a field of view (what the camera can see). An improved design will need to be intuitive.

The brain is able to make itself think that external tools are mere extensions of the body, so it's no surprise that the mouse has been successful. I wonder if the lack of any tactile response in these interfaces hinders them somewhat or if it's all the same for the brain.

Re: The Future of UI

#56

Post by whimsy »

musclman wrote: post #7

Sure, it looks cool, but it appears to require a lot of slow and inefficient physical movement to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Imagine a bunch of cubical works sitting at their desktops waving their arms around trying to navigate their computer's file system :-)

No kidding. There was a comic about this a while back.

http://okcancel.com/comic/3.html

Re: The Future of UI

#57

Post by jacobolus »

watmough wrote: post #33
hop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces together and ships a useful product - like the iPad UI... I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would…

Philip Greenspun had some pretty choice words on MIT Media Lab. http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/suck Scroll down to Example 3. It sure looks like Greenspun's page, using simple formatting, has aged very very many times better than anything the MIT Media Lab would have been doing.

The Media Lab does all kinds of neat research. The point of Greenspun’s argument is that the purely promotional website structure designed by generic managers, even ones who manage a lab that does neat stuff, is much less useful to its intended audience (potential grad students) than a website designed for some concrete purpose like explaining the first-person history of computer science.

You shouldn’t misrepresent his words to be an all-purpose indictment of the Media Lab.

Re: The Future of UI

#58

Post by jacobolus »

DannoHung wrote: post #37
sdfx wrote: post #16

These new UI concepts are always awe inspiring, but what is really the benefit of using them? One of the most popular demonstrations is browsing through a bunch of photos on a huge screen with large gestures. While this looks quite impressive it's inaccurate when performing specific tasks (e.g. the color-selection planes in the video), the gestures are limited and you have to learn somewhat unintuitive ones apart fro…

I don't know. Why did it take so long for touch screen interfaces to become huge when almost everyone loves them? On the other hand, why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system?

> why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system?

This is far from generally true. I defy you to make a command line interface for performing a piano concerto, painting a landscape, or flying an airplane.

Re: The Future of UI

#59

Post by elblanco »

Nice first effort, but after watching all I can think is:

arms = tired

looks like a clumsy, highly particular and low volume way to sift through data

Re: The Future of UI

#60

Post by alain94040 »

jacobolus wrote: post #58
DannoHung wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Why did it take so long for touch screen interfaces to become huge when almost everyone loves them? On the other hand, why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system?

> why are command line interfaces still the most efficient way for experts to interact with a system? This is far from generally true. I defy you to make a command line interface for performing a piano concerto, painting a landscape, or flying an airplane.

True. I also don't really feel the need for a command line on my iPhone.

My point being that yes, command line interfaces are the most efficient way to interact with Linux, but elsewhere, not so much. Maybe it means that Linux was designed for the command line.

The fun fact is that is that deep inside, the iPhone runs some variant of Unix.

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