Hi Richard,
Your zooming interface description is a great. I am not sure I am visualizing mechanism of the interaction correctly, but I like what you are describing very much (get back home to the nest feels like the right paradigm). It would be cool to have a chance play with it.
(By suggesting "unhiding" the back button + providing a "home" button, I tried to describe a "minimum work" changes that would allow to "find a way back". Not sure it is agreeable but it seems easy and help navigation)
Milan
On 2007 April 2 16:20, Richard Karpinski wrote:
Wild idea for geographic navigation.
On 2007, Apr 2, , at 9:00, Milan Zimmermann wrote:
- I think the largest potential issue is ease of eToys
navigation for someone who is running the system for the first time. I am thinking how to modify the UI, without significant changes, to help a new user to not "get lost" (for example by following a few projects from the cloud menu). I think people's sense "not getting lost" is greatly satisfied when there is a way to know "how to go back" - either one step back, or all the way to the beginning. I realize this is where the "Navigator->Prev" is used, but it is not very obvious for a first time user, mostly because it's contents (the Prev button) is "hidden". I am thinking if the following would help:
Background - Why geographic navigation works
When Jef Raskin, the father of Macintosh, proposed a zooming user interface for a hospital information system, it was built that way. It worked well, but the part that interests me now is that utter novices learned the system quickly. They became comfortable and competent in literally less than a single minute. Of course, computer experts took longer but they succeeded in less than two minutes. This was using a mouse with two buttons designated Zoom In and Zoom Out.
My analysis is that for millions of years, our ancestors succeeded in getting back to the nest. This imbues their living descendants with a natural talent for learning to navigate in a geographic world, even one where there is a lot of content in zoomable regions. I want to take advantage of that native ability in an even simpler system, one which uses the graphical input device alone with no keys or buttons at all.
Utility - Why auto-zooming is good for you
The first thing to notice is that there is room for unbounded content if you can write it very small and zoom in to read what interests you. If you showed a shelf full of products, there would always be room for more detail, even a complete user manual, in a region no larger than ten or sixteen pixels on a side. The rollover event could be interpreted to auto-zoom into the region. The amount of zooming could be arranged in the construction of the zoom world to be just right for reading text or viewing images in that region.
Next, we can observe that rollover works the other way too. If you do the natural thing to return to where you were, you will cross the same region boundary in the other direction and be back there again. This is so simple that nearly everyone, I claim, will discover it on their own. They shouldn't have to, when less than a minute of training is required, but they could, especially if they are kids and not yet overly concerned with making no mistakes. Indeed, it works for the preliterate as well as those who can read and compose text.
Beyond zooming - Making the graphical input device alone do even more
I would go further and devise a mouse only (or touch pad only) gesture for select, and at that exact moment, make a pie menu appear to permit the second half of a noun-verb command to be chosen and activated. But I shall leave further discussion of such extensions for future occasions.
Initial introduction - How to make first use painless
In gaming arcades, there is often an attract mode which gives hints about what this game offers. For us, this includes several introductory eToy projects. With the auto-zooming interface, it would make some sense for the initial screen to have each of them in a region with a well defined border and let folks auto-zoom in to whichever strikes their fancy. Re-crossing that border, anywhere, naturally returns you to the original screen contents. Rapid learning can be expected.
Since there is always room for another help sheet or demonstration video on any screen, gentle training can always be at hand. Even a direct passage to the initial screen, despite violating the strict geographic navigation paradigm can be arranged to be awfully clear and quite effective. Any navigation problem which is discovered to be common can be addressed in such a way without much time or effort required to set it up.
Barriers - Why this scheme cannot be adopted at this time
We need to press forward and we already have much too much to do. This would be a radical change which we have no time to consider at present. It would take weeks to set this up just to see if it works. Nobody needs this. It won't work. People will fall into the auto- zooming regions and be lost and stuck. It is not now such things are done.
Richard Karpinski, World Class Nitpicker 148 Sequoia Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 dick@cfcl.com Home +1 707-546-6760 Cell +1 707-228-9716 http://cfcl.com/twiki/bin/view/Karpinski
ps Put (or leave) "nitpicker" in the subject line to get past my spam filters.
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