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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