New UI Metaphors starting to emerge?
This posting is one of those triggered by the coming together of several things in to a ‘light bulb moment’.
The first, although I didn’t realise it until now, is the Multi-touch touch screen technology used in the iPhone. If you haven’t seen Steve Jobs’ launch presentation yet, go take a look even if it is only for the bit [16:00 minutes in] where he shows the natural way it scrolls with just a finger flick and [33:30 minutes in] where he uses two fingers in what he calls the pinch to zoom in and out.
The second was less dramatic. Whilst playing with my new phone, I suddenly realised that using the joystick control for moving around the menus just come naturally - no instruction, no reading through obscure documentation, it was just obvious how it would work. What you need from a user interface is intuitive just works-ness.
The final thing was a video demonstration of BumpTop. I could whiter on for several paragraphs explaining it, but better still go watch the video.
Impressed, I was! My colleague Ian Corns, who gave me the heads up on this, postulates on combining BumpTop with the Wii - now that would introduce a new human/computer interaction metaphor. Unfortunately in an office environment, it could also introduce many Wii injuries from over enthusiastic document organizing.
Now [here comes the light bulb] if the tablet screen had Multi-touch installed; imagine reorganizing your documents on your BumpTop with a flick of an index finger, shuffling the piles with roll of a couple fingertips, sweeping the clutter in to the trash with the wipe of a palm - how much more natural could it get!
If the piles on the DeskBumpTop were books, or journals/articles that had been collected from a bibliographic discovery session how much more intuitive would the ensuing research be?
If I was the guys from BumpTop I would be knocking on Mr Jobs’ door, if he isn’t already knocking on theirs.
Update:
For an excellent, and mesmerizing, demonstration of what I’m thinking about but on a larger scale than a tablet screen - take a look at this. Thanks Leo for pointing me at the link for this.
January 30th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Interesting idea. If you check out how the flickr photos are arranged in Yahoo’s “TagMap”, it’s a bit reminisent of BumbTop (though at a far more basic level):
http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php
I think one challenge is the limitations of icons as far as expressing what the content actually is. I mean, when I saw that pile of Acrobat icons, it just looked like that: a pile of undifferenciated Acrobat icons.
It’s hard then to arrange them without resorting to some form of “Details” look.
In any case, there’s certainly a lot of work (on occasion breath-taking) in this area. Jefferson Han’s “Multi-Touch” work is an obvious example:
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
http://www.fastcompany.com/video/general/perceptivepixel.html
August 14th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
[…] why is OS X better than other (*cough*Windows*cough) operating systems? Metaphors play a huge part — when you use a Mac, you’re not just browsing through files or using plugins, […]