The problem with computers is that you have to use them through an interface. You, as a user, are stuck on one edge of the system, the user interface (UI). The problem is that until somebody invents a working neural shunt or interconnect like the ones seen in the Wachowski brothers’ film The Matrix, we have to make do with some sort of UI for our computers and gadgets.

There have been some great looking user interfaces invented purely for entertainment on the TV and movie screen. From the slick research screens used in CSI, to the somewhat creepy gloved hand interfaces in Minority Report (which are somewhat reminiscent of modern multi-touch UIs), but it strikes me that all of these would have to be learned just the same.

Recently it has been getting more and more obvious to me that we are stretching current UIs to breaking point. Most folks put up with them at best, some learn them quite well but almost everybody has at some point been frustrated or upset by a computer interface.

Crying and spilt milk

What to do about it? Well there are plenty of people who are frustrated by the status quo. Let me guide you through the grievances I have with current UIs, using the words of greater writers than I. Stephen Frank paints the bigger picture:

There have really only been two dominant UI metaphors in the short history of desktop computing:

• Keyboard + command line
• Mouse + desktop

A third metaphor, the pen, never really gained much traction.

and

History then brings us to a fourth metaphor, direct interaction via multitouch, introduced to most people by the iPhone. … we’re still saddled with either a virtual software keyboard, or a tiny, cramped hardware keyboard. Neither of which are a great experience. But text entry is so fundamental to everything we might want to do with a computer. Are we stuck with the keyboard (a holdover from the typewriter!) forever?

Rui Carmo has also written on the frustrations with software interfaces, saying such things as:

it seems to me that we’ve been stuck on the same metaphors for a while: the document, the folder, the message, etc. … it’s the result of decades of lack of imagination regarding the way developers think people should manipulate data on computers (i.e., “traditional” methods), and, on another, it’s probably the single hardest nut to crack considering that the kinds of data we manipulate on a daily basis today now tend to reside outside the machine we’re handling … UIs these days are, in many ways, shallower and less flexible than you would expect, … usually making a mess of things due to the conceptual nuances of how people expect SMS, MMS and e-mail to work like.

There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza

Various fixes, patches, re-imaginings and perceived standardisations for our Human Computer Interaction have been proposed over time (there are books and books on the subject) however I want to pick out a few of the ideas that interest me:

Mr Gruber and Mr Çelik between them have come up with one of the many ways of quantifying the ‘usability’ of an interface. It is obvious that people have been reading their blogs and following their ideas when I see online applications springing up like ketchup.

Even I have my own ideas about UI Design and I don’t work on or design UIs, I just use them almost all the time. This is taken (slightly out of context, admittedly) from an older post of mine where I said:

My check list of a perfect implementation to kick start widespread use must:

• make complete sense at first or second glance for any user
• be such a useful function that it is used frequently, and
• be applicable as a design pattern elsewhere

As well as all the theory for coming up with better UIs, the web has been something of an ongoing experiment, especially the Twitter ecosystem which has been called a playground for UI design, and rightly so. There have been applications written for all manner of devices, many of them experimenting with new ways of showing fast moving information.

When designing applications, people have tried various ways of mocking application user interface elements together, using paper or magnets, people record the best things they have seen and categorise them for later. What does this tell us? Designing good user interfaces is difficult, really really difficult. Most people are doing the best they can with what tools they have.

When the going gets tough

In the history of engineering, when great engineers have found it difficult to proceed, they have gone back to basics and reinvented their tools. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was such a man. He is famous for having spent vast fortunes in various attempts to prove his engineering prowess, nearly bankrupting himself on several occasions.

I don’t know how much money the Wright Brothers poured into their ventures, but they certainly put a lot of time into their work and were some of the first Americans to use a wind tunnel for researching theories. It is this kind of dedication to the cause that gets the kind of results that moves engineering forward in ways that leave us thinking “How did we manage before we had that?”.

To boldly go

It is with this kind of background that I have high hopes for the immediate future. I am going to go one further than all the recent hype and say that Apple are onto something big. Really big. Engineering greatness big. Why? Well I’m guessing, but they have been investing huge amounts.

The Company’s research and development expenditures totaled $1.3 billion, $1.1 billion and $782 million in 2009, 2008 and 2007, respectively.

They have also been really quiet recently. I don’t mean quiet like Apple is so quiet that you have to know how to treat the investor call kind of quiet, I mean they seem to have been going to extroardinary lengths to cover up their actions in recent months. Anybody who watches Apple is used to their trick of keeping quiet until they actually have something to show and sell, rather than something to show-off and fail, but this time there is no denying that the hype has spilled out of the tech press and overflowed into the mainstream news channels.

I reckon that this time Apple have allowed this level of expectation to reach these heights because they are absolutely convinced that they have something really new. Something like a new paradigm kind of new. Something we haven’t seen before. I don’t doubt that the people inside Apple have believed this all along, there has always been plenty of jokes about the reality distortion field at Apple, however in the past they deemed it necessary to dampen expectations about announcements. This year, if anything, they have made it worse.

So what do I expect? I expect them to take the touch interface concept and show us what it can really do. I expect Steve Jobs himself to say lots of really great, really wonderful, incredible things about something, and show us where the next step in user interaction is going.

Whatever they announce, Apple’s event is sure to make interesting viewing. Except if you are part of the competition that is.