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I am finding that WIMP is becoming a broken paradigm. If you have enough screens and enough rdp terminals open, and enough browser tabs it starts to work against you. Given that the ideas behind windowing systems is over thirty years old, is there anything better on the horizon?

I have heard that 3D interfaces are a gimmick, but don’t know if this is true. Have we already reached close to the optimum HCI, with the only improvements being in better taskbars and tabs? Or is there a step change or two in the works?

I am more interested in ways to manage different applications and information displayed to me, rather than input devices which does seem to have some innovation (touch, voice).

Links to anything interesting on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

jtb
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Jeremy French
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3 Answers3

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Once you have as many things going as you list in your question, no interface is going to help you much more than what we currently have.

While we as humans are capable of a certain amount of multi-tasking most of us are not capable of keeping track of a great many things at once. Tools that try to help us manage many things at once usually end up interrupting our train of thought so often that they actually reduce our efficiency, not increase it.

So until the H in HCI is somehow improved, there is a limit to what the C can do to improve the I when dealing with many tasks.

I suspect that any HCI improvements we will see will be specific to particular tasks, not the massive general bag of tasks that modern GUIs are expected to facilitate.

David Spillett
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I never accepted the whole 'icons' part of WIMP
but I wish we could use more than one pointing device...

With the advent of touch devices this is starting to gain some traction, but is far from being built into the GUI. There was a driver you could get to drive another mouse into your display, but again, the applications are mostly unaware of them.

3D interfaces have some promise, but cloning the desktop onto sides of a rotating cube are not enough.

I'm a bit worried about the comment that the H in HCI must improve...
Fighter jets can far outperform what a pilot can handle,
so is there hope of improvement?

The correlary is that Apple newton could learn your handwriting,
but the palmpilot taught the human to adapt instead.

I'd like to see some of the visualization ideas become more common place,
like fisheye lenses and stuff

further reading: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/research/visualization.shtml

ericslaw
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While touch screens have been around for a while, they are just a substitute for a mouse. Apple made an significant improvement with multitouch. But we need to expand this to a true gesture based system. Soon inexpensive visions systems will be able to watch our hands in 3D. This will give us new and intuitive ways to interface with our software. I think this will be the primary interface of the near future.

I know everyone likes voice input, but most of us work in a group of people. Several people all talking to their PCs at once will not work well.

Jim C
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