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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

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Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#141

Post by gdilla »

georgemcbay wrote: post #107
aphyr wrote: post #13

The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate. - The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of…

Re: Dials. I HATE, HATE, HATE the way more and more cars are doing away with the dial. Dials are awesome. Especially in cars. I can operate the dial while driving and not risk killing someone. Replacing dial controls with flush push buttons, or worse consolidated touchscreens that control virtually everything means either I don't get any control of my radio/AC/etc when I am moving or I risk running someone down becau…

although, i do think that buttons on the steering wheel, which you learn to use without looking are a big big enhancement to anything on the console.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#142

Post by Gormo »

gigamonkey wrote: post #135
Gormo wrote: post #118

The author makes a very valid point, and it would be quite interesting to see what kinds of tactile UI designs might be achieved. But I think there's an important distinction to be made in how we build tools to solve physical problems and how we build tools to solve conceptual ones. Apart from purely remediative technologies such as Braille, I can't think of any technology from any era of human history in which conce…

You should check out the book The Myth of the Paperless Office. They report research where they gave folks tasks like writing a summary of several magazine articles and one group did it all on a computer and the other did it on paper and they watched how people actually worked. There was a lot of subtle physical interactions in the paper group, such as moving different articles closer and farther away on the table th…

The position of the paper on the table seems like an entirely visual variable. What information about the documents or the content within them did the latter group ascertain through tactile senses?

I'd assume that the amount of information about the content that was acquired tactilely was none. Feeling the paper can only give you information about the paper medium itself, not the ideas encoded in written language on it - conceptual content is non-tangible, by definition.

So the mistake the computer group made was to try to model the human-paper interaction with software, when software isn't made out of paper. They should have attempted to figure out what human-content interaction was being proxied via re-positioning the paper, and modeled that in the software.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#143

Post by hammock »

aphyr wrote: post #24
joebadmo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insightful. It seems to me that the touchscreen, because of the reconfigurability you point out, is the lowest common denominator of input. It makes a lot of sense for a highly portable device, because you can pack many configurations into a small device. I guess what I lament is the richness or input resolution you give up. And if general computing trends more toward this lowest common denominator, we're faced with…

You're absolutely right: it is a spatial resolution problem. There are only so many distinct targets for a finger on a given surface. Part of the reason we're seeing so many finger-oriented glass interfaces is because it lets us sweep the resolution issue under the rug: capacitative sensing just isn't that good yet. However, I expect that in the next twenty years we'll be able to offer affordable glass with both disp…

Your vision has me imagining a future where tiny stylus tips are implanted into the tips of our index fingers. Like a little nubbin that increases the pointing precision of our fingers. Not sure I like that vision.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#144

Post by eavc »

jerf wrote: post #54

I would submit that part of the problem is that nobody really has a clue how to use your hands. Are we going to have a thingy for every subtask that we want to do? Are our computer workstations going to resemble carpenter workbenches? Probably not, if for no other reason that lack of cost effectiveness. We've got something like the Wiimote as pretty much the epitome of hand-based interaction, but it's not very precis…

A relatively near-term possibility is the recognition of natural gestures. If it's too loud, I pat my hand in the air downward a few times or put a finger to my lips for mute. If it's too bright, I shield my eyes. If it's too hot, I jerk my hand back. If I want to see the time, I look at the clock, and it turns on.

There's also plenty of room for big, dumb controls too. Hit the phone to make it stop ringing. Or squeeze it or shake it or tap it on your palm like a pack of cigarettes.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#145

Post by kisielk »

aphyr wrote: post #13

The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate. - The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of…

Funny you should mention MIDI keyboards. Many musicians are now seriously using iPads to play music. For a good example check out ProjectRnL on YouTube. They use a bunch of apps, some developed by Jordan Rudess (keyboard virtuoso and keyboardist for the band Dream Theater) that let you play things you can't easily play with a conventional keyboard. He managed to replicate a lot the features of the Continuum Fingerboard (an expensive "continuous keyboard" controller) with some iPad apps. The main thing missing is, as you stated, pressure modulation. I'm convinced though that something like that will be coming to tablets not too long from now.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#146

Post by aphyr »

henrikschroder wrote: post #105
aphyr wrote: post #13

The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate. - The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of…

> A well-made dial is almost always faster and more precise than up-down digital controls. Eight years ago I bought a microwave oven for my apartment that had a digital knob. It's a physical knob hooked to the timer, but since it's digital, it accelerates. Below one minute, each "notch" increases the time with 5 seconds, but as you go higher, each notch adds more and more time to the total until it starts adding 5 mi…

Agreed. My roommate's new microwave is a Panasonic with exactly this behavior, and it's one of the best appliances I've used. Was actually thinking of it (and some physics PSU/amps) when I wrote this.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#147

Post by aphyr »

kisielk wrote: post #145
aphyr wrote: post #13

The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate. - The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of…

Funny you should mention MIDI keyboards. Many musicians are now seriously using iPads to play music. For a good example check out ProjectRnL on YouTube. They use a bunch of apps, some developed by Jordan Rudess (keyboard virtuoso and keyboardist for the band Dream Theater) that let you play things you can't easily play with a conventional keyboard. He managed to replicate a lot the features of the Continuum Fingerboa…

I think the tactile response is important. I see the ipad falling at the extreme end of the response spectrum: glass, unweighted cheap keyboards, weighted keyboards, cheap piano, Steinway. Reconfigurability is important, but I suspect that expressive performance is improved by that interplay of position and resistance.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#148

Post by aphyr »

hammock wrote: post #143
aphyr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right: it is a spatial resolution problem. There are only so many distinct targets for a finger on a given surface. Part of the reason we're seeing so many finger-oriented glass interfaces is because it lets us sweep the resolution issue under the rug: capacitative sensing just isn't that good yet. However, I expect that in the next twenty years we'll be able to offer affordable glass with both disp…

Your vision has me imagining a future where tiny stylus tips are implanted into the tips of our index fingers. Like a little nubbin that increases the pointing precision of our fingers. Not sure I like that vision.

No. I think individual fingers are actually less precise than manipulating an object with the whole hand. For one, it's hard to see what's under your fingertip, whereas a stylus can be very thin. You're able to use more muscles and apply leverage, which reduces jitter and improves precision. Barring anatomical changes, I suspect external implements will be around for specialized work for some time.

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#149

Post by Symmetry »

RyLuke wrote: post #44

The OP is rehashing the concepts around pervasive or ubiquitous computing: the notion that computing will expand out to meet us in tangible products, as opposed to being solely accessed on dedicated computing devices. There's been much more than "a smattering" of work in this area. Lots of really smart industrial designers and engineers have been working on these ideas for quite some time. I personally based my Indus…

Yeah, I was going to bring up the Media Lab and TMG myself (I was a solder monkey there for a while as an undergrad). Go look at some of the stuff they have on their webpage. http://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

#150

Post by warfangle »

andrewflnr wrote: post #89
warfangle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike the lack of tactile feedback on touch devices, as well. There's technology out there to /provide/ tactile feedback on these devices - but it hasn't been rolled out to anything consumer yet, that I'm aware of. I can't wait for it: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/10/29/electrostatic-feedbac...

Actually, lots of phones use vibration to give tactile feedback. Mine does it badly, but I'm pretty sure others do a better job of it.

Vibration as a tactile feedback is extremely coarse. Electrostatic tactile feedback can simulate textures, button presses, and so forth - on your fingertip, instead of on your hand.
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