Mastering the Tao of Personal Computing

We need to hurry up! Personal computing is evolving too slow. It’s needless to say that the amount of information we need to interact with increases every day. Display dimensions are getting bigger, but this type of scalability is somewhat limited - no matter how big a screen gets it will always be limited to the viewing frustum of the human eyes. On the other side user interfaces in widespread personal computing are still stuck in the 80’s. Almost no development at all - nothing more than rudimentary improvements. Even Apple is incrementing too slow over it.

The thing is we’re still mimicking early media types and no one (neither Apple or Microsoft, or even free software initiatives) have the guts to leave behind old paradigms and move to radically new user interface mechanisms.

Some say a radically new user interfaces would be unintuitive and unnatural, but the adverb intuitive in nothing more than a reference to someone’s level of acquaintance or past experience with a concept. This simply means that in order to feel comfortable with a system you need to be relatively experienced with similar systems. But what are the options when most of the systems are poorly designed? To design an intuitive system we need to repeat the design flaws of the previous systems our potential users were exposed to. So maybe we should not set intuitiveness as a goal, but instead focus on human cognetics and solid scientific principles when exploring new possibilities for user interfaces.

Some say there is no business for radical changes, especially in times of crisis. People want something that has already been proven useful. There is no margin for risks… So, I’m going to publish a comparison between current metaphorical user interfaces with an alternative one that relies on information physics.

My points of view about personal computer user interfaces are strongly influenced by Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface. In his book he wrote about the application of Zoomable User Interfaces and he also referred to the research work done in this field by Benjamin B. Bederson with the Pad++ software at the University of New Mexico. Currently the information about Pad++ is moved to the web pages of the University of Maryland, where you can find a handful of useful papers (a must-read for everyone interested in designing and developing ZUI’s). I’ve recently found this comparison in the last pages of a paper titled Pad++: A Zooming Graphical Interface for Exploring Alternate Interface Physics. I’ll publish the comparison with just minor modifications.

Four distinguishing differences

A physical interface strategy can be distinguished in at least four ways from a metaphor based strategies:

First, metaphors necessarily pre-exist their use. Pre-Copernicans could never have used the metaphor of the solar system for describing the atom. In designing interfaces, one is limited to metaphorical resources at hand. In addition, the metaphorical reference must be familiar to work. An unfamiliar interface metaphor in functionally no metaphor at all. One can never design metaphor the way one can design self-consistent physical descriptions of appearance and behavior. Thus, as an interface design strategy physics offer design-ability and tailor-ability that metaphor does not.

Second, metaphors are temporary bridging concepts. When they become ubiquitous, they die. The familiarity provided by the metaphor during earlier stages of uses gives way to familiarity with the interface due to actual experience. The current generation of kids have grew up with personal computers around them and a world of desktops, files and menus, but even though these are metaphors, and are also a successful ones, to these kids a desktop is just a computer screen and a file is just something on a hard drive with no mental association with the real life entities originally used for the metaphors. Successful metaphors also wind up as dead metaphors. But the pervasiveness of dead metaphors as files, menus, and windows may well restrict us from thinking about alternative organizations of computation.

Third, since the sheer amount and complexity of information with which we need to interact continues to grow, we require design strategies that scale. Metaphor is no such a scaling strategy. Physics is. Physics scales to organize greater and greater complexity by uniform application of sets of simple laws. In contrast, the greater the complexity of metaphorical reference, the less likely it is that any particular structural correspondence between metaphorical target and reference will be useful.

Fourth, it is clear that metaphors can be harmful as well as helpful since they may well lead users to import knowledge not supported by the interface. There are certainly metaphorical aspects associated with physics-based strategy. Our point is not that metaphors are not useful but that they may restrict the range of interfaces we consider.

What do you think about this?
Tell me, what you want to be able to do with your personal computers and what user interfaces you would like to have?

This post is tagged Benjamin B. Bederson, Design, metaphor, Pad++, physics, user interface