| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 | ||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 TEST CENTER Beyond the keyboard and mouse By Steve Jefferson , InfoWorld Test Center October 27, 2000 The artificial importance of the OS is severely restricting the way we interact with computers
The way we interact with computers has not significantly improved since the invention of the mouse. But with the number of resources packaged with an average desktop computer, the ability to incorporate voice and eyesight navigation and speech should already be commonplace. There are two main reasons for the continued lousy interfaces to which we are subjected. First, improving the end-user experience takes a distant backseat to developing future growth. Second, the current model for developing an application rests more on the requirements of the target operating system than on the needs of end-users. Specifically, application interfaces are limited to the API hooks the OS developers provide, a restriction that stifles originality rather than helping to advance the way we relate to our machines. Few changes to OS Clearly user interfaces are not where they should be today, given the rapid technological advancements of the past 10 years. Although Windows is the most successful operating system ever produced, it is not fair to blame Microsoft for the relatively sorry state of the user interface. But it is fair to state that it has done little by way of advancements to its OS. Despite the numerous versions since Windows 3.1, little has actually changed for the user. Based on the desktop metaphor invented by Apple 16 years ago, the current OS interface has not seen a major improvement since OS/2 gave us the ability to multitask in the early 1990s. Think about it. Input capabilities have remained relatively stagnant, with the mouse and the keyboard doing virtually all of the work that could now be handled by voice and eyesight technologies. And although the options for output have increased significantly, there are no commercially viable talking computers. If anything, only the ability to share files and resources such as printers and storage has seen significant improvement, and that's only because the concept of sharing was not part of the original design of the personal computer, which was intended to be used as a stand-alone machine. If OS interfaces have seen little improvement since their inception, application interfaces have fared even worse. It seems that once file menus were adopted, application user interface designers fell off the face of the earth. The Web brings needed change Without a doubt, the Web is the most exciting thing to happen to the user interface since the mouse. Free of the burden of having to adhere to an operating system's rules, designers of Web applications have implemented just about every new technology except speech. Until fat operating systems go away, the Web represents the new frontier for good interface design. Ideally, enough people will recognize the problems of building applications for an operating system, rather than for people. Only then will the OS disappear into the background, quietly enabling designers to create products that allow us to use any and all of our senses to interact with computers -- without demanding our time or frustration. Innovation should and will be measured not by how many revenue-generating versions a company has released, but rather how much easier the developer has made the computing experience. Return to the Test Center End-user package Steve Jefferson (steve_jefferson@infoworld.com) is a senior editor in the InfoWorld Test Center. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
