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• Mouse input
• Touch pads
• Touch screens and on screen keyboards
• ICONs
• Speech input/output
• Speed of user interfaces.
• Integration of graphics, text and video.

Many of these were available to computer scientists long ago.  Let's examine them in some detail.

The mouse is still the workhorse and it grew out of at least five Xerox  patents.  The functionality of mice have improved with optical mice being the best.  The three button mouse is quite old and is exploited in many applications. 

Touch pads are very old and were used on computer aided design systems in the 60's and 70's in far more powerful forms.  At that time they were the complete user interface as the pads were large and could be filled with symbols and icons. The current touch pad on laptops is terrible and slows down users dramatically.  It's mistake prone and awkward.  It's also right in the way and not good for power users.

Touch screens were developed in the early 1960's first with the DAC 1 voltage pen and later the IBM light pen.  Screen touches with the finger are very old too and are of use in certain applications.  Professionals who use a computer all day long don't use touch screens due to the fatigue factor.

ICON based systems did not develop out of MAC at all, but were developed again at XEROX in Silicon Valley and exploited by companies before Steve Jobs used them on the Classic Mac.

Speech input/output is not very useful on a computer that is doing lots of work.  Picture yourself at the airport shouting at your computer and it politely answering:  "Did you say Cancel?"  A mouse stroke is much easier and far quicker.

The speed of our present user interface is much, much slower than it needs to be.  If you look at certain new interfaces, which are really quite old, you will see that.  The powerful design system Blender that is available on the Internet shows how fast and productive computer-human interfaces can be.  Are they easy to learn? No!

Here is what makes them fast:

1. Full use of short commands are utilized on the keyboard.  These are combinations ctl, alt and other key characters used in combination with other keys.  Once a person gets used to these, it is hard to imagine having a system that did not use them
2. They use the 3 button mouse to its fullest, thereby doing things without a lot of hand movement with great speed.
3. ICON areas change quickly as a result of input.  Whole areas have depth of content that is easy to use

Systems like Blender are not easy to learn, but they are wonderful to use.  User interfaces have evolved not in power, but to be the lowest common denominator.  It's not that software designers don't know there is a better way, it's because they are afraid to introduce something old or new that is different.  Training a mass audience is hard enough

What's been lost over time?  Believe it or not lots of things have been lost.  Here are a few:

• Gesture based systems that are user teachable.  These were used in the early 80's to great effect.  You could teach the computer what a mouse gesture meant and use it very quickly.
• Plug-in function buttons were standard on the IBM 2250 graphic system in the 1960's.  There were 32 buttons set into a box that was on your right or left hand side and they could take on tasks that greatly speeded up user input.  Vestiges of these appeared on some keyboards with the Home Button or the Browser Button, but nothing like the in-depth use of them that was standard early on in the industry.
• One of the biggest loses was the use of the mouse buttons to keep commands under where your mouse is at present.  At one time there were 3 cursors.  One was under your mouse and another was in the ICON area and a 3rd was right under your current position and available if you hit the middle mouse button.  It would bring up another set of ICONS right under your cursor so you did not have to move your hand up to or over to an area on the screen.  When you were done your cursor returned to where it was. This was highly productive and very easy to learn.
• The Track Ball is still in use and you can buy a mouse like Track Ball with buttons to replace your mouse.  It minimizes hand movement and can be quite effective.  It disappeared on the PC, which did not feature it.  The MAC did not use it much at all.  The Tektronix display used it very well.

So what's to come?

It appears that gestures can be of great use.  They can be quite subtle and in most laptops we have a camera pointing right at us.  The hands are occupied with the keyboard and mouse so it would be head movements or expressions that would be useful.  There is a lot of research going on there at present.  Expressions would be good, if they could sort out a bad day from a close that window.

The help feature has not kept up.  This would be easy to fix.  Right now you have to click help, ask a question and as a result you get a lot of things to look at.  If Help of all kinds worked with Google precision, it would aid non-specialist users.

In order to use Help now, you have to know too much.  You should have statistical results at your fingertips in Help.  That is, when you enter a few words, Help should predict what you're looking for and present it under your cursor like Google and Bing do.  No statistical data is kept on what people need help with on applications or systems.  This would be easy to fix.

The user interface does not have depth.  It's still hard to play with a lot of windows that are over one another.  Bigger screens will help.  We use two screens to great advantage.  It would be good for instance to be able to lean forward with a keyboard touch on a special character and have windows appear quickly that were hidden by others and also leaning back would do the reverse.

Integrating graphics with every application would be useful.  A standard set of tools that would allow us to mark up an email or document and have it available to others as a layer over our documents would help a lot.  This would mimic the way paper works.  That is, we can mark up documents with a pencil.  Lot's of systems have this, but it is not universal and thereby of limited use to the general public.

Sketching is still a pain to do.  It requires special programs.  This needs to be changed possibly with a new type of pen input that works on surfaces of different textures.

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Thursday, February 24, 2011