White Paper
Evolution and Revolution in the User Interface
by Justin Richards

Today's GUI - The 'WIMP' Interface
The user interfaces of today are dominated by the so-called WIMP UI - Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers. While there is no denying the success of these interfaces in bringing desktop computing to millions of users across the world, the GUI has grown to be a cluttered, discordant world of clashing icons and wasted screen space.

In the WIMP world, objects (or more usually, applications) are presented in rectangular windows. They do not look real, or even bear more than an occasional passing resemblance to anything in our real world outside the computer. And amongst the visual noise and clutter, are hidden the clues necessary to make the cognitive leap to accommodate a metaphor which relies on the idea that 'windows' can exist on a 'desktop.'

Objects and applications alike are represented by icons. But these icons only show a gross level of information - they indicate the class of object, but rarely impart status information or make important properties apparent. All icons are the same relative size, and pretty much the same shape. And icons must be 'opened' before they are 'alive' enough to do very much.

In the WIMP world, menu bars and tool bars proliferate. Users spend much of their time 'mining' menus or hovering over buttons waiting for help.
example of nested menus

As the user fumbles through the interface in search of particular functions, the clutter and visual pollution detracts from the content or task which should be the user's main concern. The UI itself distracts and intimidates the user rather than helping.

Today, the focus of the user interface is often on the GUI controls.

An Alternative - A Clean Screen UI and RealThings
In many respects, the way forward for today's content-centric world is obvious. Cut down on the visual clutter and pollution and focus instead on the content. This will have the bonus effect of making that content seem more like 'real world' content as traditional design methodologies
example of organizer drawerand experience can be brought to bear. An escape from the constraints of the rectangular world of the WIMP interface can only bring the UI closer to the world that the user already knows and understands.

In fact, we can already see the start of a reaction against the cluttered WIMP world. Lotus SmartSuite, for example, provided tool bars according to context, rather than present every conceivable function for every possible circumstance.

More interesting is the UI demonstrated by Lotus Organizer, where most operations can be performed in place without resorting to menus or tool bars. Users are presented with a UI that resembles something they already understand - a book. The Smart Center drawers for Calendar (shown here) and Address are also a natural and very usable extension of this philosophy. They are unobtrusive yet accessible - combining the value of pull-down menus with real objects that provide valuable, but not over-comprehensive, function for standard and frequent tasks to the user.

The World Wide Web
If 'suite-bloat' is one driver towards a clearer, more accessible world for the users, the World Wide Web is another. The Web is content-based, and that content assumes only the relatively limited built-in function of a Browser. Any other functionality has to be provided intrinsic to the content. Often this function takes the form of pseudo-menus and pick-lists, but even these exhibit a freedom and a freshness of design. This is partly because of the fact that the content is freed from the software and mental constraints of the standard UI tools and widgets provided by the underlying platform.

It is also partly due to the democratization of content. The pages of content on the Web are often put together by designers and novices with little or no previous computer design or programming experience. But, in fact, these are people who are psychologically more able to communicate with the 'common user'. Their designs are not polluted by the design constraints that the UI designer used to have to deal with.

The most interesting design emerging from the Web, though, is where function is intrinsic to content - where objects (for want of a better term) exhibit exactly the behavior that their visual appearance suggests; where function is in support of task; where form suggests purpose; where interaction is apparent from visual appearance.

Web to WIMPs
It is hardly surprising that there is a general move to incorporate web-like interfaces in the WIMP world. But generally, this is a patchy solution that combines two fundamentally incompatible styles of UI.

RealThings: Focus on content, not control
While the general movement is in the right direction, the progression is still quite slow. We can take these notions further still, and the key to this is IBM RealThings.

RealThings exhibit a new, real-world user interface style. They set a new direction in making user interfaces more approachable for novice and casual users. At its simplest, the RealThings philosophy is to make software constructs and applications appear as they would if they existed in the real world outside the computer. Objects and mechanisms are presented in context, and actions are surfaced in more natural ways.

The key to making RealThings work as the next major stage in the development of ease of use is knowledge transfer from the real world. Computer users, no matter how new to the interface, no matter how naive, possess a huge body of experience from, and a good understanding of, the real world. By making the behavior of computer objects more natural - more like the user expects from his or her experience of the world - we make it more accessible, less daunting, easier to comprehend and to use. In short, rather than expecting the user to learn what is in effect a new language, we leverage what the user already knows.

And in doing so, we shift the focus away from controls and back on to content.

RealThings
As we have said, the primary motivation for making objects seem more 'real' is to capitalize on what the user already knows and leverage knowledge transfer from the real world. It is not to slavishly copy objects, techniques and interactions from the real world. One example of a RealThing we have created is the IBM RealPhone.

RealPhone example

RealBook example Currently in development is the RealBook. Here is an object which will be integral to the user's computer experience - not peripheral and related to just a small subset of tasks. And we are capitalizing on the user's knowledge of real books as well as a design that is well-understood and tested by time.

But we aren't just copying the real-world with its inherent limitations, we are providing navigation techniques that enhance the real world, as well as providing mechanisms and interaction cues that are immediately recognizable and understood.

RealCD example The RealCD will soon be available as another RealThing. In the real world, the user has to take the CD to a player (connected to an amp, speakers, etc), insert it, and only then can they play the CD. Using the RealCD this problem is addressed by bundling the player and the content together - a solution that is impractical in the real world but which addresses the user's actual task.

Having decided to bundle the two, though, the designers have made the CD look like what users could reasonably expect an amalgam of CD and Player to look like if it did exist in the real world. The object itself - the composite - is not 'real' but its components are. The CD case looks like a real CD case and provides the visual information about medium and content that is important in the real world. The controls look like the control panel of a CD Player. Given that users have an understanding of the task involved and have knowledge of how that task is performed in the real world, of the objects with which they would interact, this design is easily accessible.