Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!micor!isishq!testsys!doug
From: doug@testsys.uucp (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Virtual manipulation
Message-ID: <862063161DN5.52@testsys.uucp>
Date: Mon, 20 May 91 10:57:51 EDT
References: <1991May13.174958.10492@kodak.kodak.com>
Reply-To: doug@isishq.fidonet.org
Distribution: na
Organization: SKAN Communications Inc. - Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 206

In article <1991May13.174958.10492@kodak.kodak.com> 
(Paul F. Doering) writes: 

> Raise the ante in the current debate: what will be the
> real-world consequences of training a user that a hand is a suitable agent for
> "picking up" a hot ingot? My point is that in designing an interface we must be
> as concerned with habits carried away from it as we are about intuition
> brought into it.  (Insert here the standard boilerplate about responsibilty in
> programming.) So the question: can anyone refer us to a study (not a
> hypothesis) in which an investigator quantified the extent to which remote
> control or remote sensing has been unwittingly transplated as behavior back
> into the real world?

I don't have a study to point to per se, but some thoughts on the
nature of what needs to be studied.

We write a lot about interfaces. I sometimes think we don't pay enough
attention to *that to which we are interfacing*.

I think back to the history of the invention and eventual widespread
use of writing. Before writing humans could communicate with speech
and touch. Some symbolic signing and graphic art were also used.

Writing appears to have begun very much as (or quickly became) a
technology to preserve speech. The oldest 'literature' we have, The
Illiad, the Bible, etc., consist of documents which were handed down
verbally for many generations before they were actually written out.

Now writing is a very *odd* sort of *interface* between human and
speech, preserving almost none of the physical attributes of the
original. We transferred an oral medium to a visual one with dark
marks on light surfaces. The shape of those marks 'contains' sound
values which we can learn to re-construct into the original words of
the written communication and re-produce the sentences verbally.

When we read, most of us don't do so out loud. And most of us can read
reasonably clear text much faster than we can listen to speech. Few of
us can write (or type) as quickly as we can speak, though.

We use different senses (eyes instead of ears) to read, and very
different muscles in our bodies to create written, as opposed to oral
representations of our words.

There are a number of studies and theories concerning Paul's question
about "the habits carried away" by users of writing. I  specifically
think of the work of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Those sholars
demonstrate a number of influences, including changing the way
indivduals think from a "round oral" kind of consciousness to a
"straight and linear" kind of logic. Innis goes on to say that the
very  survival of great civilizations is impacted by that kind of
psychological impact on the consciousness of its citizens.

At the very least, most of us can recognize that written communication
is quite a different medium than oral communication, even though we
use the same vocabulary, and mostly the same grammar rules in both -
and even though we may be communciating to the same people.

The most obvious elements involve speed of typing and speed of reading
vs. speed of listening vs. speed of speaking and interactivity. Most
writing is done in a non-interactive mode. We write something. Later
the audience reads it and still later the audience may write back.

This is a lot different from a two-way conversation in which very
small amounts of data are transmitted before there is feedback.

To shift this into computer user interfaces, I really think it is
necessary to bear in mind that the interface is only partly between
the person and the machine - and that it is also partly between the
person and the *DATA*.

There are many times when the computer screen is nothing more than an
electronic piece of paper, displaying paragraphs for the user to read,
and the only interface needed immediately is something to turn the
page from time to time.

Arguably, the presentation of text data for reading remains one of the
most important (and common) applications of the computer.

And this leads to a further question. If my computer contains a
thousand 'volumes' of information, each with a title, what sort of
interface is efficient and useful for me in order to quickly find what
I'm looking for in it?

I could have a 3-d image of book-shelves, and move my hand with a
mouse to specific volumes, and look at their titles, eventually
selecting one to open. Or I could do an alphabetic/wildcard sort of a
list of titles. Assuming I know how to use each of the technologies
equally well, my guess is that the latter is going to be much more
efficient. It bears no relation at all to the sort of physical task
which dealing with the old physical book technology involved, but it
does bear relation to the *intellectual* problem of limiting the
search according to criteria I understand.

I'm looking for my book on dog grooming. I have only one, so the
keyword search for "dog" and "grooming" will limit my search to one
volume very quickly. 

The 'best' user interface is the one that lets me pass that
information into the computer as quickly and simply as possible and
get the information as to how to open that book most quickly.

However, what is 'best' for me and what is 'best' for you *may* not be
the same thing. The user's education, training, and familiarity with
the specific software tools influence what sorts of tools that user
will be able to use effectively.

A lot of GUI software I have seen attempts to create visual metaphors
between computer information management tasks and older technologies
based on paper. The whole idea of the file-folder containing separate
items is something most of us have experienced in paper-land. We know
what it *means*. I do wonder if this is useful in the long run. YES,
it certainly helps the person who knows all about paper and nothing
about computers quickly figure out what's going on. But does it ever
help that person learn about computers and the new possibilities for
information storage and retrieval which computers allow but paper does
not?

It is reminiscent of reading out loud. You can create something that
bears greater similarity to the supposed 'original' by reading out
loud - but it slows you down and prevents you from using some of the
new possibilities inherent in any kind of writing and not inherent in
speech - such as speed and abstraction.

Other kinds of GUI I have seen are more based on reducing the need to
type long strings or commands, using pointing to make selections
instead of typing full names. In reducing keystrokes, and speeding up
transfer of the human's idea to the computer, these appear to have an
overall positive impact. Given a list of strings, it *is* quicker to
move the cursor to the one you want than to type out a long string to
identify it.

So far I have been looking at the problem of finding and reading text
which happens to be stored on a computer - text which could just as
well be stored on paper bound into books.

Hypertext aside for the moment, there is another kind of thing that
computer users interact with. And that relates to the operation of the
computer itself. I have found my data and now I want the computer to
do something with it or to it. Print it, mail it, sort it, spell check
it or whatever. Specify and execute some procedure.

Again we seem to have a situation where the highly trained computer
user can type a modest number of keystrokes to invoke very complex
processes while the inexperienced user is confused and befuddled and
doesn't know what s/he might do here. GUI to the rescue - menus and
boxes and little pictures to suggest the sorts of things that the
software at hand can do.

The final observation I would offer relates explicitly to education or
training. Most of those who are reading this will have spent 10 to 20
years in formal education during which we were trained to deal with
written and spoken language, the use of pens, paper, books and for
many of us, keyboards. Some large proportion of us will have spent 3
to 7 years of that time using those tools to learn specifically about
computers, and each of us almost certainly has some few years of
intense experience with operating or programming computers for
academic, commercial or personal purposes. 

I doubt that there are very many readers here who have serious
problems handling command line arguments when we want to use software
that requires those.

The majority of the people using computers in the world today,
however, have had only hours or days of training on computers, though
many years of training with paper and writing. The great marketplace
demand for GUI is mostly generated by those who *do* have problems
with command line interfaces, problems relating mostly to lack of
training and/or experience. In order to provide relatively
inexperienced customers with workable computer tools, the industry has
gone to great lengths to build interfaces which minimize the need for
experience or training.

Sometimes I wonder if this isn't exactly like building a machine into
which you can plug a book, a machine which will proceed to act like a
tape recorder and whose speaker will begin to 'read' the book to you
out loud in the best Queen's English.  If you have customers who can't
read, but are comfortable with the spoken word, that machine might
sell very well. 

But is it still not a better solution to have the user learn to read?

If our population has grown up with unix computers in the classroom as
well as pens and paper, and if the typical high school graduate had 12
years of computer experience as wella s 12 years with reading and
writing on paper, I suspect that GUI design teams would be doing
things a LOT differently.

Just as it is not especially efficient to put written things into oral
form often, it is not necessarily efficient to put a list of titles
for a library into *visual* form, in the way the library stacks are in
visual form. Perhaps the more efficient mode of presentation is a
highly abstract kind of shorthand and the best interface for many
things is not the one that makes something look like its pre-computer
counterpart, but something that reduces the large and bulky to its
most basic and meaninfgul essence.

If we can reduce the content of a 3-D display and simulated physical
motion to a single character or string which conveys the same meaning,
have we not advanced?

These are mostly just more questions. I think Paul's questions are
very much up the right alley.

=Doug


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