Interface Free

Multi-Touch Interaction Research means getting a rear-projected drafting table that functions as a touch-driven computer screen and then playing around with it. Expect “Interface-free” to become a much, much bigger deal as devices like this become ubiquitous.

It’s a while off yet, though, and the one time I’ve seen anything remotely as sophisticated as this in daily use was at the Kobe Earthquake Memorial Museum, where they had some huge flat-screen displays that were fully touch sensitivity displaying a satellite map of Kobe. It’s amazing just how intuitive the interface to control the map at the Museum, or the more complex three dimensional one shown in the first video is. As it’s so similar to manipulating the familiar, real-world, counterpart, you forget to even look for an interface and instead begin to interact with the display directly, and it behaves the way you expect it should.

Isn’t it time we abandoned the twenty-year-old desktop and filing-cabinet metaphors for personal computing and started moving towards something a little more all-inclusive?

Over the past few years, I’ve seen plenty of interface suggestions that build in a third dimension and on the whole, they’re rubbish. Being able to stack files in 3D and then sort them into piles doesn’t help the user at all: it’s more needless clutter and more forced metaphor to learn. New users shouldn’t have to be taught the mouse movements necessary to lasso files into groups and stack them orderly. The way forward is removing the interface altogether and using metadata and search intelligently.

If you’re on a Mac, you probably already have Quicksilver installed. If you don’t, do. If you’re on a PC the bastard step-child is Launchy and while it’s nowhere near as powerful or extensible as Quicksilver it proves the concept.

Which concept?

That we do not need an interface forced upon us in order to access, most efficiently, the majority of the most frequently used computing functions. The interface should be invisible. As the Quicksilver documentation points out, the process should be invisible and second-nature, leaving only the results.

What we need to move forward is learning tools. What we need is universal search. What we need is decentralized data storage. What we need is intelligent, and automated, tagging. We we need is software that gets the hell out of our way and lets us do what we want to do. And what we want to do is not to spend our time struggling with software, interface, or the newest iteration of the window metaphor, it is to spend that time creating.

Posted in Tech on Wednesday November 1, 2006.