Direct Manipulation interfaces of the future

There are some great TED talk videos that give us an idea of what the next generation of direct manipulation interfaces will look like: Jeff Han’s intuitive “interface-free” computer display and  Blaise Aguera y Arcas demo of Photosynth. Does Han’s touch display mean the days of the computer mouse are numbered? In the future will we navigate to sites via text hyperlinks or will we be able to view all the documents on the web via Arcas’s Seadragon software?

Photoshop and Directness

During our discussion of direct manipulation interfaces today we cited Photoshop frequently as an example of a direct interface. I view Photoshop as one of the most direct interfaces; it simulates specific artistic functions in a way that is incredibly convincing. It does so in a way where even describing the act of painting in Photoshop as a metaphor for painting seems odd. This is because it so closely resembles the physical act due to its directness.

We contrasted this highly direct act with the notion of generating art using a programming language. These seem to exist at the opposite ends of the directness continuum in many important ways. But, I don’t think that they are utilized differently as a result of the directness. Rather it seems that the real difference is the amount of precision and automatization that they afford.

Photoshop relies primarily on the model world metaphor and programming relies on the conversational metaphor. Because of this we tend to use each for certain types of tasks–Photoshop for tasks where feedback is beneficial and programming where precision and automatization is necessary. But, if we could produce an arbitrarily high degree of precision through a direct manipulation interface, or we could automate action through a direct manipulation interface would we? I’m curious what people think and what they think a high granularity direct interface that can automate tasks might look like? Or does this already exist in some forms?

Welcome!

Thanks to everyone who came to today’s 1st reading group meeting. We had lively discussion of today’s reading on direct manipulation interfaces:

 E.L. Hutchins, J.D. Hollan, and D.A. Norman, “Direct manipulation Interfaces”, in User centered system design, D. A. Norman and S. W. Draper Eds., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 87-124, 1985. http://hci.ucsd.edu/120/direct-manip.pdf

Adobe Photoshop came up more than once in our discussion as it displays both the strengths (everything at hand) and weaknesses (visual clutter) of direct manipulation interfaces.  This week the Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop relayed on his blog attempts by Adobe to make the interface for Photoshop workable for experts and novices alike:

With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces.  Today if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, “What do I do?,” the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, “I dunno–you tell me.”  That’s not real cool, and we can do better.

Looking forward to reading everyone’s posts and comments!