Gestural Interfaces, or What your $1,000 software can learn from your $10 software
Friday, January 11, 2008 at 11:55PM Chances are if you read this blog you have on your computer several thousand dollars worth of creative software. Maybe After Effects, maybe Shake, Final Cut or Avid or Premiere (or all three), Fusion or Nuke or Scratch, Color or Audition or maybe even Inferno.
And chances are, somewhere on that same hard drive, you have a computer solitaire game that was either free with the computer or just about.
What could a professional content-creation platform learn from some free time-wasting software? The answer is a gestural interface.
Generally speaking, in solitaire you move cards around according to certain rules. Who wants to learn rules? No one. So innovative game developers have created a way to gently teach you the rules of any solitaire game. When you try to move a card, they provide a kind of emulated tactile feedback that tells you "yes, you can move that card here or "nope, that card can't be placed here." It's so subtle you don't even notice it happening, but after a time you find yourself actually "throwing" cards into the general direction of their goals and expecting them to find their way there. The guidance that was at first a learning aid is now a reward for expert status. Experienced solitary players whip cards around on their screens like Ricky Jay.
Solitaire is so simple that software designers have had to innovate in order to distinguish themselves. Another arena in which ubiquity demands extra effort for a bit of distinction is mobile phone design. Apple's iPhone is now famous for its touch-screen interface. Somebody got all the phone out of the way and let you just touch your stuff.
There may be a hundred "competing" solitaire games, but there are only a handful of NLEs; only a few compositing applications, less than half a dozen professional 3D applications. These tools compete on bullet-lists of sexy features or must-have capabilities. And so their UIs tend to lack innovation. They have a sort of Northwest Airlines outlook on fancy UI features—sure, you could have them, but next you'll want snacks and a little TV in the back of the seat in front of you!
Apple's Motion is bucking this trend with its realtime focus and animated 3D view transitions. The now-dead 5D Colossus system featured some innovative tablet-based metaphors. There's an argument that fancy UIs are the domain of the fundamentally simple application, but the not-at-all-simple Flame/Flint/Inferno has some wicked-cool pseudo-tactile functionality, like "slicing" a connection between nodes, or scooping up nodal connections by sweeping one node over others.
The next time you use something that "just works," whether it be an iPhone or a martini shaker, think about ways that your favorite creative software could be more intuitive. It takes a lot of effort to make a computer program as easy to use as a deck of cards—but why should this effort be reserved for games and phones? Usability isn't an extravagance and shouldn't be a luxury, and you deserve it in your expensive software as well as your free games.
Reader Comments (14)
Hi Stu,
totally agree with you on that one. I often get the impression that the companies have the best feature programmers but at the same time no UI Designers... An example is ANTICS, which I tested recently. Nice concept,you can get some nice stuff done but the interface is a real pain in the a from 10 years back. BTW, that´s why I love the new Magic Bullet Looks :) Clean, nice design and features under a beautiful hood...I´m really curious about the new NUKE UI...
Greets Tisi
i agree, some think that UI fanciness takes away from the creativity and user needing to know what they want to do rather than some tricks and happy accidents from a set of commands or UI dealio's.
i disagree, an elegant and useful creative UI opens up huge possibilities from an inspirational standpoint as well as speed and productivity.
Lead On and hopefully some will follow,
j
Perfect example pixelrock—I'm DYING for a good storyboarding/animatic tool, and Antics looks so promising. But the UI would have to be 3D iPhone on steroids for the process to be faster or easier than taking pencil to paper.
Interesting post. I wonder with this whether there is similar thing going on that there used to be with the print world. Printing was often referred to as a "black art" as in, you had to be in the know to know how to operate it - the lingo as opposed to the procedure, most of the time. Knowing how to navigate an unfriendly UI is a similar thing. If the UI of these apps become too "user friendly" perhaps the high end developers feel they might isolate their operators who have spent years learning their originally oblique operational procedures and therefore have us serfs chip away at their pedestals.
This may be a bit polemic but I think there is some truth in there. After all, if the ability to use these tools becomes transparent then craftmanship becomes a matter of hard work and ability rather than trickled down knowledge.
Just a thought.
This is a great post dude. And I am hopeful that the major NLE developers of the world will begin to innovate in this direction. Kind of seems like the main players in this arena are in a similar place that the Solitaire shareware makers are in. Where else can the 'bin-timeline-cut' GUI go if not in the direction of an intuitive gestural toolset?
... Oh wait, maybe I do need 50 layers of RT HD video playback.
It does seem like it could be time for someone to come out of nowhere and just build a simple, elegant, gestural NLE that sits on top of a robust and smart database. A tool that does one thing really well - edit movies quickly.
So many of the NLE's, with their tape legacy, have to spend a lot of resources on capture, playback, device control, etc. What if someone decided that they were going to build an NLE that assumed data already lived on a hard drive and it just concerned itself with organizing and editing that data?
I'm just sayin'.
ee
If the developers don´t do it, you can also add extras yourself: try http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/ to add mousegestures under windows... I´m sure there´s something similar on OSX. Not the real deal, but still better than nothing.
I'd like to point out that this is the reason I chose to go with Mudbox over Z-brush. Mudbox I could work with right out of the box, but Z-brush I went through an hour long tutorial and STILL couldn't remeber where things were. Z-brush is definitely able to do more than mudbox, but it's no good to me if I have to spend days just learning the basic layout.
@smackey: You´re right, that´s mainly because Zbrush treats 3D Objects in a very own way. Partly because, as you said, Zbrush is much more than just an 3d modeler/surfacer. Speaking of 3d: The UI is one of the reasons i love Cinema4d... It just looks good and I like to work with good looking things...But on the other hand please don´t overdo it...less glass/aero, more traditional graphic design please :)
Someone should send this to the developers of Blender. The worst 3D UI ever IMO.
If the UI is designed well enough anybody can use it. This opens the door for better work. Instead of trying to figure out the UI the user can spend their time on creativity.
The new Macbook Air and it's gesterall trackpad may improve this, though I am sure applications will need to be modified to use it, but I love the idea of pinching and pulling and rotating with just my fingers.
I am looking forward to an editing system that can be done completely gesterally.
It's funny how big players still use awkward UIs. In Photoshop there's no way to get color selector (color wheel) to pop up with a hotkey. Instead one needs to hunt for it with cursor. And when painting this needs to be done several times per minute.
Example of proper digital painting interface is Colors! for Nintendo DS. It's homebrew application which has color selector and brush settings mapped to shoulder buttons. Quick it is.
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/
I remember seeing a viral video when the iphone came out. It was a father letting his less than a year old baby scroll through the pictures on his phone. The baby knew how to get to the next picture, rotate and even make them bigger.
Without stating the obvious, and paying someone to create this; Apple let the customer take care of their job.
I agree with your article, and I do wish that powerful programs like AFX were more straight forward. I'm sure there are tons of reasons why they are not, but I can definitely tell you that most software developers and releaser's do not spend enough time using their own software, or listening to feedback about it's usability.
Some things should be straight forward. Some things that are complicated should still be straight forward. The 80/20 rule should apply in all area's of design and functionality, as a whole and not just for function.
I always have better idea's and suggestions for how software could be better, but I never trust that sending an email to the company would get anything done. I know in smaller communities, this is the norm, but for Adobe...how does one person sending an informative email make any difference?
The time for change was many years ago. The only thing consistent with pro level application is the way they treat their end users, and the way they expect their end users to adapt to their programs. These companies and developers seem to forget that the only thing consistent is change; especially in technology.
Two pieces of software that I'm incredibly enthusiastic for their power and intuitive ease of use are "Sketchup" and the new "iMovie". A lot of people have complained about the new iMovie and understandably so -- they crippled it's breadth from the previous version. But what I'm blown away by is that they've written it from the ground up and I'll be damned if it's not starting to feel like a high-end finishing tool.
one thing about teh apple iphone is that its entirely built on other peoples technology - most of what the iphone does, was done by other phones! The thing that makes the iphone special is the touch screen interface. It got this by buying touchstream keyboards and then killing off the keyboards!!!!
These days touchstream keyboards go on ebay for nearly a thousand dollars each - they are that good! They might also help with your input issues I don't know.