Doing What Comes Naturally
A lot of the secret sauce behind Natural User Interfaces is the understanding of the difference between abstract and direct manipulation of content. I’ve been talking about this a lot over the past couple of weeks and was delighted to see that Bill Buxton gave a half hour talk entitled “Doing What Comes Naturally” (Buxton starts at 2:13:40) at the end of MIX10’s second keynote.
Buxton started off with a very clear description of what Natural User Interfaces (NUIs), or what I’ve referred to as Natural Human Interfaces, are by using the example of a saxophone. He used a device modelled after a saxophone to simulate the sounds of a saxophone. This is a NUI, a direct manipulation. Compare this to a computer program where certain keys on a keyboard translate to the holes on the saxophone and you understand the difference between a NUI and an abstract UI. Buxton went further to say that what make the saxophone a NUI is not because it’s a representation of a real saxophone but that it’s a device that he already knows how to use because it respects the skills he’s already attained from learning how to play the sax.
He went on to demonstrate how this NUI could be used to simulate a flute and finally a guitar. Although different instruments, they all speak the same language and a note on one instrument translates to the same note on another instrument (albeit they are achieved through different interactions.) What made the saxophone a NUI was that Buxton didn’t need to learn how to use it.
Natural User Interfaces are interfaces that respect the skills acquired by users.
A guitar or flute would not have been a NUI for Buxton because he didn’t have the skills to use them, he could play a saxophone so a saxophone was.
If you found a PC 2000 years in the future and all trace of human kind had been lost. What would a good physical anthropologist infer about human beings today? And they’d say you have no legs, you have no mouth, you have an eye that can do fully saturated colours you have an ear that can do 200Hz bandwidth and you have one claw with about 80 fingers.
The gap between the tools we currently use to interface with computers and the way we interact with our world is clear. A computer is not built for US, we have been forced to learn how to speak the computer’s language. The most important part about technology is not the hardware, not the software it’s the wetware, the human being.
The important part of this equation is not what is the latest and greatest input technology. The important technology is to focus on is the Human Being, how we work, how we naturally interface. This is why I referred to these interfaces as Natural Human Interfaces, the Human part is important, it’s the most important. The input technology changes swiftly and constantly, but human beings change very slowly and so you will benefit so much more in the long term from understand human beings and designing for them and not a particular technology.
