Have you been getting NUI recently? If you've ever used a touch screen then you're well on the way to the brave new world of 'Natural User Interfaces'.
Well, that's what they were calling it over at UX Week in San Francisco. But it's also know as 'Gestural User Interfaces' by many.
NUI will be preceded by GUI ('Graphical User Interfaces' - still predominant today), and before that CLI ('Command Line Interfaces').
Some programmers still prefer CLI (are you old enough to remember DOS?) and it's amazing to watch the speed at which they work in an alphanumeric world.
And then there's the not-so-distant-future of OUI ('Organic User Interfaces'). It'll blow your mind... I'll blog about OUI at a later date.
So, whether you like it or not, NUI is the next wave of human-computer interaction. Pull your socks up and get ready!
My earlier blog mentioned new Windows features based on software it calls "multi-touch". This will be part of the next version of Windows due out in 2009.
We've been living with NUI for quite a while. Touch-screen kiosks, ATMs, the Palm Pilots and more recently the iPhone.
But many of the interactions we see on touch-screens still conform to GUI-style buttons and commands. Even the majority of iPhone apps are stuck in the old-world paradigm of point and click. That's because the people designing this stuff are still stuck in GUI.
The true potential of NUI won't happen until GUI designers step outside their comfort zone. They need to understand that interaction with a computer via a keyboard and mouse is different from a gestural interaction with your fingers and a touch-screen.
The beauty of mutli-touch and touch-screen is that you can break-out of the point and click mentality. The primary input device becomes the human finger (which is a lot more flexible and nimble than a mouse).
For example, on the iPhone and Microsoft Surface you can zoom pictures, maps and web pages using a 'stretch' or 'shrink' gesture with your fingers. A traditional GUI interface would require you to multiple-click a [+] or [-] icon to achieve the same zooming action.
So, are YOU getting NUI?
