How much time do you spend every day walking your PC through the steps necessary to turn your intentions into actions?
Let me give you an example. I want to copy a file from my PC to a remote UNIX server. I know where the file is on my PC and the server name & directory I want to copy it to. There are a few ways to do this, and faster ways if I’m willing to do it via the command line and have my auth keys all squared away, but hear me out:
Done! It’s taken 10 steps to copy a file from one machine to another. Your brain knew immediately what needed to be done as soon as you decided you wanted to copy a file, but it then took… what… 30 seconds or so to turn that intent (“Copy blah.txt from here to there”) into the action (file is copied). There are countless other examples of how we have to slow ourselves down so that the computer can keep up, and so far none of the user interface motifs I’ve seen make the problem any better. Keyboard/mouse, multi-touch, gestures, and so on all seem to be strafing the problem instead of attacking it.
Interestingly, I had one of my best human-computer interaction (HCI) experiences two weeks ago at Disney. The wife and I have annual passes for Epcot, so we headed over there after work one day and poked around the Innoventions pavilions. There we stumbled across an attraction that let you ride a Segway. Granted, it’s in a very controlled environment, but it’s still a decent intro to the Segway. What makes it a terrific HCI experience is that there’s not a lot of translation between intent and action. You want to go forward, you lean forward; backwards, lean back. Given the interface, I could envision a time in the future where, if I owned a Segway and rode it a lot, it would become almost an extension of my body. It wouldn’t occur to me that I’m riding on some sort of conveyance… intent and action would become one.
Admittedly, a Segway is a complex device with a simple function, and computers are complex devices with complex functions, so comparing them apples-to-apples isn’t really appropriate. But it does give us a sense of what’s possible… the ideal we should be striving for. The year is 2010: what’s needed for truly brilliant human-computer interaction moving forward?
Originally published at bbhart.com on January 26, 2010.