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How 'Minority Report' Trapped Us in a World of Bad Interfaces
- maldusiecle 10y agoCrazy that this guy criticizes the Minority Report interfaces and then makes the terrible claim that interfaces ought to make use of humans' ability to grip. Not all humans have strong grips, particularly the elderly. There's a reason newer buildings use lever handles over doorknobs. My hope would be that the interfaces of the future would be more accessible to the disabled, not less.
- ksk 10y agoWow, I guess the article really struck a nerve with you huh? Taking advantage of major human ability != making it an exclusive requirement to use said interface. Also, suggestion != claim.
- chc 10y agoYou sound a lot more het up about this than the parent comment. The parent just suggested that this article is ignoring some things that should be considered if you want to talk about designing interfaces for real people. It's important to design things that don't fail when confronted with edge cases.
- ksk 10y agoI don't think calling something crazy is merely suggesting something. What edge cases? What design? What are you even talking about? A person merely said "Hey guys, have you thought of this". GP got on their case as if they were against the disabled or something.
- mistercow 10y agoIt seems pretty obvious that accessibility is always going to require extra thought. Some people are paralyzed from the neck down, but we still have keyboards. In any case, why do you think that using gripping as a UI action implies that you'd need a strong grip to use it?
- maldusiecle 10y agoSure, it's always going to require extra thought, but why create problems when you don't need to? There's this entire train of reasoning that seems to be that a rich interface is one that places as many demands as possible on the human body. That thinking will inevitably lead to problems of this type. If grip isn't necessary, why make it necessary? I could have made a number of objections of this type to the article, but this seems the most obvious and understandable one.
- nitrogen 10y agowhy create problems when you don't need to? I don't think it's fair to make non-disabled individuals use a less productive interface, just as it's not fair to prevent disabled individuals from using the interface of their choice.
- CaptSpify 10y agoHow is gripping more productive? I'm not disabled, but much prefer grippless handles because they are easier/simpler to use.
- nitrogen 10y agoI was speaking in more general terms, but I'll provide some examples. I grip my mouse to use its side buttons to navigate forward/backward in a web browser. Human hands are generally good at holding things, and flat touchscreens/trackpads aren't very holdable. Power tools, steering wheels, gear shifts, volume knobs -- all examples of things that are gripped.
- mistercow 10y ago> There's this entire train of reasoning that seems to be that a rich interface is one that places as many demands as possible on the human body I disagree completely. The line of reasoning is "what actions can we perform that have the highest bandwidth, and lowest cognitive load?" And various forms of manual manipulation, like gripping, are an excellent avenue of exploration when answering that question.
- muad 10y agoThe recent trend for websites is to make them as unaccessible as possible. It is a real shame to see the internet become so much less useful for so many people.
- crimsonalucard 10y agoWell not all humans have fingers either. There's a lot of vets and amputees who have no arms or legs so all user interfaces should be eye tracking based. Honestly, common sense says the guy is talking about interfaces for the general population, not the disabled. If most people can grip then make interfaces that grip. Don't force everyone to read braille just because a few people are blind.
- falcolas 10y agoTo be fair, waving your arms around, or hitting targets 10x smaller than the finger you're using to hit them is no more accessible than twisting a knob or moving a slider. No single interface will ever suit all potential users, so any accessible design has to keep this in mind.
- glangdale 10y agoHmmn, I'm betting that a user interface that requires 'gripping' might possibly not require someone with the grip strength of a gorilla. And your self-serving invocation of the disabled fails to notice that most gestural or touchscreen interfaces are atrocious for the elderly or disabled, and have a tendency to misconstrue 'tremor' as intentional movement. Generally if you want to design for the disabled, you probably are designing for the disabled, rather than using them as fodder for an argument.
- nisse72 10y ago> There's a reason newer buildings use lever handles over doorknobs For the cats.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYeah, as a teenager I had to disassemble my handle and reinstall it vertically in order to make the cat stop jumping on it in the middle of the night and waking me up in the process... (I like cats. The problem then was that I had way too much stuff in various cabinets and the cat liked to make a grand tour through them, throwing a lot of stuff to the ground in the proces...)
- coldcode 10y agoIt was a good interface for predicting future crimes of bad interface design.
- dmtroyer 10y agoT9 Texting RIP.
- clock_tower 10y agoCost is another driver here; touchscreens are significantly cheaper than buttons, and can be used to do more things -- at the cost of being awful for typing on.
- samstave 10y agowhat happened to "Oblong" technologies (the guys who actually did the minority report UI/UX and turned it into a conference room app/system)
- PT_2014 10y agoThey morphed their high end concept stuff into smart meeting room and team collaboration tool platform called Mezzanine (- see http://www.oblong.com/ http://www.oblong.com/) which is sold into large enterprise class customers e.g IBM, SAP, Accenture, NASA, GE etc.
- rbanffy 10y agoI kept imagining the kind of BS the actors are talking about the fake graphics.
- quote 10y agoThey recently received 65M funding. You can supposedly buy that stuff.
- kristopolous 10y agoif you thought the interface was bad, try programming with their software stack.
- tomjakubowski 10y agoInteresting. Would you care to elaborate?
- kristopolous 10y agoI worked there for 2 years. My comment was mostly jeering and being silly. It would be really bad form to speak ill of them in any substantive way. All I can say is that they punch above their weight.
- sandover 10y ago
- realfinkployd 10y agoDon't pretend you don't want a 3d printer with a Tony Stark design UI :)
- atarian 10y agoAnd despite his acute taste for good interfaces, he offers no solution to the "trap".
- eridius 10y agoIt's perfectly legitimate to criticize something without offering an alternative solution.
- lj3 10y agoIs it? What value does criticism bring if there's nothing actionable in the criticism?
- rootbear 10y agoTo inspire someone to work on it?
- hx87 10y agoIt isn't legitimate to do so without at least offering some idea of how the object of criticism could be improved though. If you criticize something, that means you know it could be better in some way, and you should at least point out those ways.
- eridius 10y agoIt means you know that there are problems with the current way, and at a minimum you hope there's a better way to do it, but it by no means requires you to know what that better way is. You can be capable of recognizing the flaws in something without figuring out how to fix those flaws.
- hx87 10y agoIf you can recognize a flaw, you also know what could be improved since you're comparing the flawed attribute to some non-flawed or less-flawed ideal. You might not know how to get there, but you at least know where "there" is.
- panic 10y agoThe linked article by Bret Victor on the future of computer interfaces is worth reading: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... Of course, Pictures Under Glass interfaces have advantages too. Touching a screen has become a familiar way to interact with technology: a more tactile interface might be harder to learn. To make a screen-based interface, you only need to draw a 2D picture and respond to 2D touches, not design a 3D object which can be manipulated in space. You can buy touch panels off the shelf instead of having to manufacture expensive custom 3D parts. But these are advantages of easiness and cheapness, not quality. If designers and engineers can put in the time to make a physical interface and users can put in the time to learn it, you can improve quite a bit on Pictures Under Glass. Think about how terrible it would be to replace a car's steering wheel with a touch screen, for example. So that's really what the article is saying: we should think of touch screens as the cheap, easy option, not the exciting, futuristic one. Our futuristic starship control panel should be a custom-manufactured physical interface instead of a cheap glass panel.
- makmanalp 10y agoWell, so the thing that I think people don't realize about gestural interfaces is that gestures are hard to do and tiring to do all day. They are also very low bandwidth. Typing is hard to beat in terms of bandwidth / strain. But there are things that gesturing is better at, and I like that that article focuses on that. I think the mistake is to try to get a catchall. That's why we have both a keyboard and a touchpad / mouse. Each does a different kind of task. Touchscreen typing, on the other hand, is a step back. Game console typing is like 20 steps back.
- douche 10y agoI'm not sure mouse and keyboard will be unseated from the top spot until we get to the point of straight mind-machine interfaces.
- klodolph 10y agoSpeech to text has been making a strong showing recently. It's been creeping more and more in my life as a faster and easier alternative to keyboard input. It does take some practice, though, so I encourage people not to dismiss it based on their first impressions.
- jccalhoun 10y agoI don't know if Minority Report started the trend, but there is one thing that I have really grown tired of in movies with futuristic tech: transparent screens. I realize that they let the director film the actor without something blocking the camera but they just seem like a lazy way to be "futuristic."
- jasonm23 10y agoAs a side note what on earth are these? https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bd/17/68/bd1768e3a8b5620d72841075d93d5909.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bd/17/68/bd1768e3a... And why are they in so many sci-fi graphical UIs?
- rbanffy 10y agoUntil we are able to dynamically reconfigure our devices to offer context-aware controls that we can grab, touchscreens seem to be a preferable alternative to buttons. You don't want your desk to become the Apollo CM dashboard.
- legulere 10y ago> If Jeff Han had designed a keyless entry system for a car, it would’ve involved dragging a secret gesture on the car’s window instead of the car automatically unlocking when you open the handle if you have the key in your pocket. So basically: "Good design is invisible"
- sp332 10y agoBoth examples are invisible. But one works with the flow of getting in your car and the other requires arcane gestures.
- jamesmcintyre 10y agoOne of my favorite design mantra's is "Design dissolving into behavior." - Naoto Fukasawa.
- minitech 10y agoThat’s not what “invisible” means in this context. A better name might be ”unnoticed”. It’s interface sufficiently natural as not to add to the things you have to think about.
- mnutt 10y agoA few days ago I tried out an HTC Vive VR device with Google's Tilt Brush app. It's basically MS Paint in 3D. You hold both Vive controllers and have a brush in one hand and your palette in the other. I was amazed how intuitive the controller UI was. Some of the controls are on the back of your hand, but it was incredible how natural it was to pick up and use comfortably. I've never been all that fond of the Minority Report floating screen UIs, but other 3D UIs can feel very natural in the right context.
- adambmedia 10y agoMore productive is to try and understand why Minority Report has successfully captured the imagination of so many, persisted over a decade, spawned an entire genre of syfy interface trope that we see in virtually every film having anything to do with future, beyond film, well into games and now commercial interface development. The assertion that the gesture interface is some kind of virulent ear-worm, dismisses what may be the most interesting thing, the fact that it has captured the imagination of so many. Why?
- hacker_9 10y agoHumans are visual creatures, so if something looks good we want it, regardless of whether it is practical.
- peter303 10y agoThere is an article somewhere about how Speilberg commissioned consultants to imagine the near future. What happens you get fresh, imaginative movie imagery loke 2001, Star Wars, Minority Report. Then fifty copycat movies.
- jerf 10y agoI don't think it's hard to imagine why the gestural interface survives in the movies. It's very visual. The main actor is moving and full of action and may even be literally jumping around. It's as cinematic as the Hollywood OS representation of hacking is. Meanwhile, out here in the real world, I'm a real computer programmer and my real interface is even more boring looking than a standard Windows install. Nobody's going to be mining my UI for Hollywood ideas anytime soon, despite the fact that I, on occasion, actually hack. It's the same reason cars explode when they go over cliffs, bullets spark when they hit things, and all those other tropes.
- peter303 10y agoSome people blame Xerox Parc for locking the world into the office metaphor. Some widely icons like floppy disks and phonsets represent obselete objects. The ancient Greeks used rooms of a house to organize information. Just think we could of ended up with that instead.
- bparsons 10y agoMicrosoft tried that in 1995. It was an interface called Microsoft Bob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
- DonHopkins 10y agoI wrote an iPhone app called "iLoci" [1] that was based on the Method of Loci [2], which had a gestural interface that let you construct and navigate your own networks of locations by dragging rooms around and "kissing" them together to connect and disconnect them. Another way to think of it is as a pie menu editor. Later I elaborated on the idea in a Unity prototype called MediaGraph [2], which lets you arrange your music in an editable gesture navigable map. [1] iPhone app iLoci by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam. [2] Method of Loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci [3] MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata. It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nisse72 10y agoI want a 2-knob "mouse" like the one I had on my etch-a-sketch 30 years ago! One for X, one for Y... [ 3 minutes of googling later... ] Of course it's been done: https://mitxela.com/projects/etch_mouse https://mitxela.com/projects/etch_mouse
- will_pseudonym 10y agoI'm curious; why does this appeal to you?
- corysama 10y agoHere's a nicely realistic breakdown of the physical affordances involved in useful interfaces in VR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id86HeV-Vb8&t=5m34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id86HeV-Vb8&t=5m34s
- kayoone 10y agoThis is also what comes to mind when comparing the giant touchscreen in a Tesla Model S to the haptic buttons and knobs in most other premium brands. Especially when driving, touchscreens just seem an inferior way to interact with the systems.
- toomanybeersies 10y agoDriving, yes absolutely, because you're constantly about 6 feet away from hitting something. For flying, touch screens are a great idea, since you have a lot of controls, and attention to where exactly you're going is less critical, since you're usually >1000 ft from the nearest solid object. Also, aircraft usually have autopilot (and often a copilot). I guess with Tesla's autopilot, it might make the touch screen a bit more usable? (at least while driving on a highway I guess).
- clock_tower 10y agoNow I want to be in position to order a GUI, preferably for some sort of notarization or document-drafting app. I'll explain that I'm actually thinking of a movie for the UI, and I want it to be as exactly like that as possible; I'm sure they get this request really often, and it won't be anything new to them; and I'll explain that I even brought some scenes from the movie to show them exactly what I wanted. And then I'll be grudgingly persuaded to pop in the relevant DVD... And the scenes will be from a pirate movie, with an old-timey European pirate/bandit/mercenary chief writing with a quill on parchment while wearing a coat with ruffles and lace. Only quills will work as pointing devices. To save your work, you sprinkle some sand on the tablet and blow it off. The tablet comes with a breathalyzer attachment, which checks for enough rum in the air to prove that you're a legit pirate but not so much rum that you're signing contracts while drunk. Voice input must be in Ebonics, which is pretty much what the Cavaliers spoke in the English Civil War. Voice output is in a thick Devonshire burr (the classic pirate accent) that makes you think that the app's probably half drunk. Now, if only someone's eccentric enough to do it...
- jackfrodo 10y agoHa, if you're ever in the area, you seem like you'd appreciate 826 Valencia's pirate supply store in the Mission district of SF. http://826valencia.org/store/ http://826valencia.org/store/
- clock_tower 10y agoI'll keep it in mind; it looks well worth a visit! I'm also toying with the idea of getting some reenactor-grade pirate clothing: long-wearing like nobody's business, and relatively easy to care for. I've even found places that sell those leather cavalry boots with turned-down tops! For an extravagant price, of course...
- StillBored 10y agoI haven't been a big fan of many of the UI changes in the past few years, but I realized the other day that these changes have actually resulted in _DEATHS_. http://www.detroitnews.com/story/obituaries/2016/06/20/obit-anton-yelchin/86130184/ http://www.detroitnews.com/story/obituaries/2016/06/20/obit-... Cause you know, having the shift level position indicate what gear its in, just isn't "cool"...
- jpindar 10y agoIf you're interested in this kind of thing, you might like the book "Make It So" by Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel, which discusses the interfaces used in movies.