Humanizing the User Interface – the power of the command line, natural language and ZUIs
The best user interface is the one that combines visual (GUI) and natural language. And the closest, cheapest thing to natural language is the command line interface (CLI); the ideal natural language medium is voice. This ideal user interface also applies to mobile.
The folks at Humanized, a group of folks who are totally thinking outside of the box, have created a “simple” (in concept) but powerful truly kick ass approach to human computer interaction, a product called ENSO. ENSO extends the GUI by implementing a command line interface that is very close to natural language; a very fast method to find stuff, invoke (context-sensitive) commands, do calculations, define your own verbs, all with what I call just-in-time command line.
Aza Raskin, the company’s President, and a user interface expert, gave an excellent talk at Google. Here Aza covers the future of human computer interaction (or what user interfaces should be): GUI, ZUI (Zooming UI) with higher level conceptual constructs that go beyond pure zooming, the return of the good old command line, natural language, and other; this is a must see video for anyone who cares about human-computer user interactions. See Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop (around 1 hour and 25 minutes). Thanks to Google for sharing this Tech Talk.
Related to this topic:
- Don Norman on UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces
- David Beer on The return of the command line interface
- David Beer on The mobile CLI: new examples and ideas
- yubnub, a social command line for the web
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