Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Computers were originally only used by people familiar with the workings of them and programmers. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) originally was demonstrated by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad, his Phd thesis. Others attribute the GUI interface design to the smalltalk Project at Xerox. Apple was the company to bring the GUI to the public, followed by Windows and lastly by Unix/Linux users, who stubbornly considered it to be unnecessary overhead.

Later came hypertext and the Internet morphed into the WWW as we know it today. Hypertext was first used by Vannevar Bush in MEMEX. The term hypertext was coined later by Ted Nelson. The universities used it in information tools and Apple used it in HyperCard bringing the idea to the public. Others attribute the first use of hyperlinks to Dynatext.

Interactive interfaces with bots and agents combined with speech recognition are the current cutting edge in interfaces. Many new concerns come with the new interfaces. A too human appearing interface may be scary, or may attributed far more intelligence than it should be. Consider how much intelligence the public already attributes to computers. The user interface should speed up and make the task easier, not exist to entertain and should not slow down the task at hand.

Some interfaces may be able to do speech interaction. If the task is user intensive such as word processing, searches, etc. Then speech in place of typing will not slow things down since the computer is already tied to the users speed. Otherwise traditional keyboarding and mouse interfaces should be used.

Other, non-anthropomorphic interfaces should be considered. People take in large amounts of information visually. Looking at a plot is far more informative than looking a list of numbers. A graphical user interface can convey much more information than a textual one. TreeViz conveys information about files stored on a users hard drive. It uses color sound and shape to map the whole drive on the screen in front of the user for easy cleanups. Animations should only be used to convey information quickly, or speed up user interactions.

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