Where next for Windows?
Ramana Rao on interface evolution
amana Rao is leading Xerox's push to commercialize the interface design work of its Palo Alto Research Center through Inxight Software, of which Rao is a co-founder. The most successful example of this initiative is the Hyperbolic Tree, an efficient technique to dynamically cluster hierarchical data on a two-dimensional screen.Not surprisingly, Rao has some interesting ideas about the direction of interface design. Pondering the future of the elements that comprise windows, icons, menus, pointer (WIMP), Rao says he believes all four will survive, but he expects each to be boiled down to its core insight.
Traditional windows, Rao says, could see the most changes because there is so much user overhead required to manage them.
"Stretchy, warping spaces like the Hyperbolic Tree may invade the interface," Rao says, but "there will always have to be some way of associating space with objects or tasks at hand ... even if we are flooded with displays."
Graphic icons can be much richer than text for a given amount of space, Rao continues, but only when they operate on an abstract, rather than a representational, level. For example, an icon of a laser printer does not imply anything more than the word "printer" does. On the other hand, the more abstract apple icon in the Mac OS menu bar suggests even to an inexperienced user that system-level functions associated with his or her Apple computer can be found there.
Anyone who has navigated scores of fonts or bookmarks knows the difficulty that menus have with scaling. According to Rao menus and lists always will have a place in computer interfaces, but he expects that they will become shorter as more efficient interface elements streamline navigation.
The last of WIMP's four parts, the pointer, is so simple and transparent that Rao says it certainly will survive. An action more than a metaphor, pointing and clicking is, to Rao, "the snap of the finger that gets me there." However, Rao jokes that "point and click" is a skewed way of defining a GUI: "It's like calling a file cabinet a grab-and-pull device."
Rao's parting shot is a perfect illustration of the frustration that many interface designers have with WIMP. "Point and click, point and click, point and click all day long and what do you have?" Rao asks. Answer: "Windows 95."