Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design

The desktop user interface is a mainstay of computing. Bread and butter, if you will. A pointer, icons, windows, menus and buttons, controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. Ingenious simplicity.

For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying. This fact seems to annoy a lot

But we shouldn't build entire paradigms, or even just individual interfaces, based on the assumption that everyone else is using computers the same way we ourselves do. Most people don't conceptualize graphic design ideas or freestyle pretend corporate presentations. Some are controlling an industrial process, editing a feature film, designing an a

I work with developers and other IT professionals all day, hang out with similar people on my free time, ride a commute jam packed with project managing office dwellers, and regularly find myself in big cities - but I haven't heard a single "Hey, Siri" for years. Like with the scarcity of touchscreen laptops, I'm sure that means something

The infinite canvas isn't bad, necessarily, but the unstructured sprawl of mixed information they often lead to seems to offer little value to the vast majority of computer users. When adding structure and bounds to the canvas, the idea does seem to appeal to a wider audience: spreadsheets are very popular. But there's a limited amount of spreadshe

Star Trek: The quintessential computer of the future. Touchy, talky and, er, video-y.

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a mouse and keyboard. This event has