We need to stop touching and start talking
Thursday, May 13th, 2010A long time ago we, humanity, drew an animal on a cavewall and pointed and grunted at it. Somewhere down the line we invented the Alphabet and speech. But the last few decades, starting with the first Graphical User Interface, we are back to pointing and (sometimes) grunting again. We mainly use a mouse to command our machines and with the touchscreen devices we don’t even bother working with a mouse anymore. We just point at the screen all the time. In 1996 Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner wrote an article (The Anti-Mac interface) about the Graphical User Interface in which they already point (no pun intended) out this problem. Fourteen years! In light of that article we’ve really gone downhill. Devices are being reduced to one big screen where pointing is the only option.
There are some bright points though. The mobile phone OS Android by Google is already implementing voice recognition in a workable way. Which is hard to do because of the many different languages which all have many different accents. But we need to push it further, we need to re-introduce the command line!
For example: You have a folder with images but you want to move all the images which are bigger than a certain size (between 1MB and 2MB) moved to another folder. On top of that you want to remove all the images which are bigger than 2MB. How great would it be if you could just type (or ask) the following: “Remove all images bigger than 2MB but put the ones between 1MB and 2MB in a different folder named ‘Big pics’.”
Already there are some great examples of applications which understand our (complicated) human semantics. Such as Ubiquity, a Firefox Plugin which is can be controlled with text commands making it easier for the user to navigate. But the best of all is Google. Google understands human talk. A very good example (taken from this article in Wired) is the following query: “hot dog”. Google understands you are looking for the food product and it understands that you are not intersted in boiling puppies. Look at it this way: imagine Google was touch-only and you had to click your way to the right result. It would take hours for you to get the desired result, so why are we so easy to accept this with other devices/services?
Currently we are in an interface paradigm which is dominated by touch. The paradigm is kept alive because we are too lazy. We’ve taken a long time to get accustomed to this paradigm so why throw it all away? Hopefully we will come to our senses so that we can stop touching and start talking with our machines.


