unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:10, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 06/17/2011 11:14 AM, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> But obviously our interaction hardware is
>> aiming at immediacy, correspondence, rather than symbolic crypticism or
>> text-driven menu-isms.
>>
>
> I can only guess you must be referring to (multi-)touch surfaces. But
> that's an addition, not a replacement.
>

yes, i thought of that, and i thought further, as you did:
what i'm trying to imply is rather that interaction is becoming more
immediate, which includes a stronger emphasis on pointing devices, where
keyboards are becoming more and more a pool for "click modifiers".

An unfortunately not so successfull attempt was made be the Mustux/Protux
team a decade ago with the so-called JMB - Jog Mouse Board, and Blender is
also another example, or Ardour, where you point with the mouse and press a
key to perform an action.

So I'm not trying to say everything is going "multi touch", even if it does
happen to be a strong trend nowadays, i'm rather thinking along the lines of
interaction is focusing more and more on the object of your interaction, and
less on some distant menu at the edge of the screen.

Your regular ILM engineer would surely appreciate such a development, on the
long run.


> Keyboard and mouse are still great to have for word processing, graphics,
> CAD and so on. The nature and quantity of required or useful commands and
> options in such fields hasn't changed.


Yes, i think so too, whereas word processing would be the only example here
which would fit the target audience of the interaction environment we are
discussing.
How CGI engineers use menus and $ 15.000 CAD suites is more of a specialized
problem outside the topic at hand imo.


> So a menu-button would be a good step towards making the interface
>> perceptively simpler.
>>
>
> The perception is not limited to a first look. It includes what happens
> during interaction. In this sense, hiding something only to reveal it at
> some point does not make anything simpler.


agreed.
But the first look will be all the ordinary user will ever get, and the less
cluttered the "first look" is, the simpler the interface appears, which
makes it easier to use already.