The Mirror’s Crack’d
I have a confession to make: when it comes to UI, I’m bit of a traditionalist. It’s not that I believe the reigning desktop metaphor is sacrosanct, or that there isn’t room for innovation, but I guess I have the same idea about UI design that Robert McKee has about screenwriting: there are certain proven principles that have always worked, and it’s better to work within them than to go for radical re-invention.
This being the case, I always roll my eyes when I see things like Sun’s Java Desktop System. I believe the JDS to be the most egregious misapplication of the term “Java” since the christening of JavaScript, and a marketing blunder almost on par with the original .Net naming confusion, but what really has me slapping my forehead is Sun’s misguided 3D UI experiment, Project Looking Glass.
The JDS website hypes Looking Glass, which is essentially a 3D desktop environment, with a lot of hypotheticals like the following:
What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?
My answer? Well, judging by the provided screenshot, it would take a lot longer to find what I’m looking for in my music collection since I would be scanning through hundreds or thousands of literal images of CDs instead of performing a lightning-fast type-ahead text search in iTunes!
The problem with Project Looking Glass is that it falls for a common fallacy in UI design: the idea that the more literally a user interface apes the real world, the easier it will be to use. The jukebox concept really shows where this idea breaks down. After all, isn’t one of the big advantages of a digital jukebox that I can instantly call up any song I can think of without having to rummage through my real world CD collection?
I’m not formally trained in human/computer interaction, but to me it’s simply common sense that any UI design should be judged both on its ease-of-use and its heuristic value to the user. Put another way: a large part of the responsibility of any interface design is to stay out of the user’s way while helping him or her perform an action or get to a piece of information as quickly as possible. Usually, slavish emulation of the real world isn’t the best way to acheive this goal (otherwise, what’s the point of using computers at all?).
This is not to say that some level of metaphor use isn’t valuable, of course. In fact, both Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen name it as an essential principle of UI design. The problem comes when the metaphor ties an interface too literally to the inefficiencies and limitations of the real world. We all appreciate the familiar “folders” of a hierarchical file browser, for example, but how would you like it if your Documents folder could only contain a small number of files?
It is the job of any UI designer to act as a mediator between the real and the virtual, but it is the measure of a good one that he or she gets the balance between concrete and abstract just right. By that standard, Sun’s UI designers have a long way to go before they can justify their claim that Looking Glass is more than mere “eye candy.”