Direct manipulation

The keyboard and mouse are input devices we’re all familiar with. Same with video game controllers. Yet they’re all an abstraction from how we interact with the real world. Enter the quickly-becoming-huge world of Direct Manipulation.

Wii: Everyone knows how this works. Instead of pressing the Square button to swing a tennis racket, you actually swing your arm like it’s holding a racket, but it’s actually holding a Wii remote that detects speed and direction. It’s uncanny in its accuracy and it’s very well implemented.

iPhone: Small-scale touchscreen interface, but the first one that is widely available to the public. Bring up pictures on your iPhone and flick your finger across the screen to get to the next picture. No more button pushing! To zoom in, you pinch. To zoom out, you spread your fingers out. Natural and far less abstract than looking for “+” and “-” buttons.

Microsoft Surface/Northrop Grumman Touchtable: Large-scale collaborative touchscreen interface. Many people can view a map, satellite photo, or your music collection. Multiple people can annotate, swap, and analyze information all at once. This is not yet available to the general public - the Microsoft Surface is years away from actual use (too many Blue Tables of Death), and the NG Touchtable is mostly military with some other government applications.

What does this have to do with cognitive psychology? Ease of learning and ease of use, of course! Direct manipulation is natural. It feels natural to tap the screen and drag down when you want to scroll. It feels natural to throw a bowling ball like you actually would in a video game. Think about the first time you had to learn how to use a mouse, or every time you pick up a new video game. Direct manipulation cuts down on the learning curve and increases a concept known as transfer of training - essentially, how easy it is to switch from one system to another. The closer we get to natural behavior as input, the less we have to learn about a new system. Instead, we can do what comes naturally. What’s easier than that?

Microsoft Office 2007: First impressions

I have not used Windows Vista and am therefore not familiar with the look-and-feel of the user interface. However, I used to use Windows XP quite a lot. This is important because applications that run on Windows should feel like Windows. Apple has Human Interface Guidelines that are out of date, sadly, but most OS X apps are consistent with the feel of OS X. Most of the time, Windows apps are good at this, too.

Until Microsoft Office 2007 came along. I haven’t used it very much, so I can’t say how usable it is once you’ve learned the interface. I’m positive, though, that there is a big learning curve. Just look at this screenshot and try to figure out how to open a file or make a new document:

My first comment was “Where is the Fle menu?”, and this is a problem - it’s not consistent with other Windows apps. Turns out that you hit the “Office button” in the upper left to get a traditional “File” menu. No other application uses this interface, and Microsoft has not released a new standard saying how other apps could implement this style. Imagine upgrading from Office 2003 or even switching from another application (like Firefox or Adobe Acrobat) and then being presented with this newfangled interface. There is no transfer of training, where concepts learned in one area should apply to another (Holding, 1991; Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901). This is a concept that has been around for a very long time, and that is because it is a useful one.

Now, admittedly, sometimes you have to throw out transfer of training and start from scratch. Windows 95 did that from Windows 3.1, as did Mac OS X from OS 9. There was a learning curve, but it is worth it in the end. Will the Office 2007 switch be worthwhile? The big problem is that if it’s worthwhile, it’ll ONLY be for Office. Other Windows apps will not use the same Ribbon Interface, so transfer of training will not be present between apps. In fact, the task switching penalty for switching between interfaces is likely to be even worse (Allport & Wylie, 2000) because users will have to switch their task sets from one app to another.

Besides throwing away the mass amount of previous experience users have had with Windows apps, looking at this interface for the first time evokes a sense of… panic. I would love to do a study with visual search, eyetracking, and the new PowerPoint interface. Talk about clutter (Verghese & McKee, 2004)!

Visual clutter in an interface is the exact same problem Microsoft had with previous versions of Office - critics called it too “bloated.” Well, has the bloat gotten any better with Office 2007? If the “Create New Document” dialog box in Word is any indication, the answer is no: