The New Era of High-Functionality Interfaces

Traditional user interface design works best for applications that only have a relatively small number of operations for the user to choose from. These applications achieve usability by maintaining a simple correspondence between user goals and interface elements such as menu items or icons. But we are entering an era of high-functionality applications, where there may be hundreds or thousands of possible operations. In contexts like mobile phones, even if each individual application is simple, the combined functionality represented by the entire phone constitutes such a high-functionality command set. How are we going to manage the continued growth of high-functionality computing? Artificial Intelligence promises some strategies for dealing with high-functionality situations. Interfaces can be oriented around the goals of the user rather than the features of the hardware or software. New interaction modalities like natural language, speech, gesture, vision, and multi-modal interfaces can extend the interface vocabulary. End-user programming can rethink the computer as a collection of capabilities to be composed on the fly rather than a set of predefined “applications”. We also need new ways of teaching users about what kind of capabilities are available to them, and how to interact in high-functionality situations.