Sunday, May 05, 2002

Where's the Progress OSNews asks Where's the Progress in interfaces? Imagining the rampant diversity in the 80's computer market, today's iterations pale in comparison to the compelling evolution of the technoconsumer market in our past. The solutions seem evident - better displays and input devices, miniaturization, and voice recognition. But there's also a call for a compelling use of 3d complementing the desktop metaphor.  We have yet to do this successfully. Wide scale change has surely been limited by the Microsoft hegemony, but most software producers are constrained by two very tall walls that cordon off a tiny space within the possible. The first is the limited (but growing!) range of available toolkits for deploying software interfaces. The second, and one that we're showing less progress on, is the inertia caused by accumulated mastery of current systems by the user base. Finding a way to avoid negative transfer in evolutionary UIs is a significant challenge. In fact, user's have come to expect that their learning on existing software systems will help them with new systems. In my recollection, this expectation was rather different back in the day.  For novel UIs, the simple fact that a user does not get positive transfer is a pretty big deal. 11:47:47 AM    comment