Posted on Wednesday 10th of January 2007 at 08:32 in The Internet

HCI needs to improve

Oli over at ThePCSpy.com wrote down his views on the future of HCI and he made some excellent points but I think there was one glaring omission from his musings - that the current input method (the keyboard) is an unnecessary source of our HCI woes.

A little history
Patented in 1868 by a fellow called Chris Sholes it's quite an old design - but the real thing to note is that the keys were positioned in this way to ensure that you were hitting alternate keys. This meant that ye olde typewriters wouldn't clash keys when typing the majority of words. However, since the advent of the computer this has become less of a concern. So are there more efficient designs we could be using?

Yes, called Dvorak
It may not be as easy to pronounce as qwerty but it was designed with typing efficiency in mind. The most used letters are placed closer to the stronger fingers and is also available in different flavours - such as right/left hand only - making it more accessible to users with only one functional hand.

First things first
So before we start looking at neural interactions and the like, maybe some should consider the manual input devices we use currently? Not that letting my computer be controlled by my thoughts would be a bad thing but I feel there could be more immediate gains from improving the keyboard layout. Albeit if the world has so many of them any change would be inconceivable. Too many years using the same device, millions of computers all using the same things - all this equals a 0% chance of change.

The Nintendo Wii
An odd addition to the topic, agreed, but a brief dabble on the Wii highlighted how different HCI could be. Point and click, motion sensitive controllers - if this world was brought to the PC it could really change the shape of (some) software development.

When will it end?
When could the change happen? Millions of machines use this standard and generations of people (myself included) touch type around this model. Changing it would cause havoc comparable with changing which side of the road you drive on.

Read Oli's article

 

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