How user interfaces work

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:48 am

I've seen two videos within a video of Alan Kay, the inventor of the desktop, which describe how Allan Kay came to develop the desktop user interface we are so accustomed to. It was a result of experimenting and understanding how the mind works.

See these streaming RealMedia files of the videos:

Don't mind the parts of the lecture, please. This is part of the Scheme programming course for undergraduates at UC Berkeley.

The idea is that humans have different input channels for their observations of the world. If you can combine these channels, you have have a working user interface. It also mentions how humans learn in different stages of child development, and that grownups still have these abilities which can be used.

See how the mouse, mouse pointer and display works:

Code: Select all

         +--------------+
         |              v
 hand moving       eyes seeing        brains combining
mouse device      mouse pointer      move mouse pointer
                        |                      ^
                        +----------------------+

  motor sense     visual sense       abstraction by brain

very young childeren learn mostly by doing, somewhat older children by seeing, and yet older children by thinking (abstraction).

Your hands give motor sensor impulses back to the brain, so your hands determine where the mouse pointer is on the screen. Your eyes see the mouse pointer and gives visual sensor impulses back to to brain how the mouse pointer moves, relative to other objects on the screen. The brain combines both input channels and can move the mouse pointer from one object on the screen to the other.

Mouse buttons are simply a way to prevent that you need to move your hands back and forth to the keyboard. Therefore, mouse buttons are a simplified version of the keyboard.

Now I'm curious if it is possible to combine other input channels to create new input devices. I'm sure there is a lot of research taking place to give us the input devices of the future, because the keyboard-mouse-display interface is not very useful for creating animation, and we really need a better interface between the human and the computer for more productivity.

The400th · Post by **The400th** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 11:29 am

I wouldn't mind a smell detector that could tell me when my animation stinks...

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:28 pm

Well, you could try to apply Psychophysics.

In psychophysics, experiments seek to determine whether the subject can detect a stimulus, identify it, differentiate between it and another stimulus, and describe the magnitude or nature of this difference.

IOW Let an audience tell you if your animation "stinks" by doing a lineup of different versions of your animation.

Walt Disney used this technique in a certain way by letting a selected audience preview animation and watch their reactions. This feedback helped him to develop a popular type of animation, known as "Disney animation". Some call it "bland", but, in reality, it was very clever marketing. If you want to appeal to as many people possible, make it so that it appeals to the average taste of many people.

Define what kind of experience you want the people to have, and, as a development process, test if your products invoke this experience by showing it to a small audience, and observing what their initial reactions are. Feed this audience engagement (or lack of it) into the production process as a positive critique.

In the web 2.0 world of today, there has to be ways to automate this process of letting people grade your animation by visiting a website.

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 2:42 pm

It doesn't work though, does it? Ford developed a car along these lines in the early 60's, (the Ensor?), it was a complete donkey and the public stayed away in droves. Walt Disney could certainly market a product, but that kind of product (despite the phenomenal skills of the people involved) began to look old-fashioned quite some time ago. Designing down to the lowest common denominator can pay dividends at the box office, but no-one with any creative aspirations would want to do it for long...and I think customers *are* getting smarter -- they certainly have a lot more choice than they used to...

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:41 pm

Yeah, but for someone like Disney, who always in need of money, this was a perfect strategy. You're right that the taste of people change over time and become more varied. The frame of reference also becomes broader as the general population acquires more knowledge and exchanges ideas with other cultures.

You can compare it with writing a book. If your reading audience is quite sophisticated, you can introduce quite sophisticated new ideas, or new combinations of existing ideas. However, if your audience isn't so sophisticated, you'll need to adjust your writing style and subject range.

Another example is the numbering system. Doing calculus in Roman numerals is almost impossible to do. The frame of reference isn't suitable tor this kind of Newtonian maths of integrals and differentials.

This is also an important thing to take into account when developing new user interfaces.

Anyway, did you see in the first video that untrained woman who had never played tennis learn to play a tennis match within 20 minutes, with the correct user interface? That was astonishing. With the right reference and tools you can learn humans almost any skill.

Concerning animation, you probably want the audience to get involved with your animation, that they connect with it in a positive emotional way. You can only do that if you study your audience.

The400th · Post by **The400th** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 5:39 pm

In the web 2.0 world of today, there has to be ways to automate this process of letting people grade your animation by visiting a website.

It's already happened in Web 1.0 - Cartoon Network let web viewers grade their pilots to decide what would be made into a series. I think it was called Cartoon Monsoon. Don't know if anything came from it, it just seemed to be won by the creators who e-mailed the most friends to ask them to vote for their shows.

Now, you can rate videos on YouTube, for what that's worth.

I'm not so sure about the power of the people's collective opinion - I think it can create horrors beyond our imagining. Crazy Frog, anyone?

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 5:42 pm

You describe "audience" as though it was a homogenous whole. There are dozens -- probably hundreds -- maybe thousands! -- of different audiences now...

Touched · Post by **Touched** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:40 pm

@jahnocli: As a small aside, the car you're talking about was the Edsel. (I know of it from Matt Wagner's Mage).

As for audiences, my personal projects are usually specifically targeted at specific audiences (usually other people like myself). So, for instance, when Cutethulhu was shown at an H.P. Lovecraft film festival, it was received very well. But the same short shown to the very general and mixed audience at Newgrounds got a very large number of reviews stating that they didn't understand the situation or the jokes (which generally require knowledge of Lovecraft's work and the more recent pop culture involving it.) Still, there are enough of my intended audience who go to Newgrounds to warrant posting it there, and they're the ones whose opinions matter to me. I prefer not to insult my intended audience by overexplaining things to appeal to the more mainstream audience.

So, my approach is certainly not the most financially lucrative, since my tastes are very much on the fringes, but it's the most personally gratifying.