Last month, as you may or may not recall, I proved, with geometric logic, that the PARC/Mac/Windows icon/window/menubar graphical user interface was the best user interface there ever could be.
This month I'll prove that it's not, and hint at what the best user interface there ever could be might be.
I'll start by claiming that this is not a problem to solve and that if you approach it as a problem to solve, you will fail.
Problem solving is never the road to the future. Problem solving is often useful, never inventive. It's throwing gravel under the wheels to get unstuck from the mud. If you're concentrating on the mud under the wheels, you're not going to grow wings and fly.
It's play that gets you flying, not problem solving; and the best play is the kind that, as Michael Corleone said of his family business, keeps pulling you back in. The most compelling computer programs are games, and the best games are can't-quit experiences that grab you like those fright flix of your childhood where at the end you still had a full box of Milk Duds but no fingernails.
The trick, as any heroin dealer or corset manufacturer can tell you, is to get 'em hooked.
A lot of people have already figured this out: Chris Crawford, Guru of Games; Trip Hawkins, High Priest of Hotness; the writers for the "Max Headroom" television series; William Shatner.
Yes, William Shatner. Shatner has given us Tek, the electronic drug, the perfect metaphor for getting 'em hooked electronically, which is what you, the future billionaire mastermind, need to do, more or less metaphorically, if you want to invent the Interface of the Future, as I'm sure you do.
That, with an exhortation to Just Do It, could be the end of this month's column, except that it leaves the central question open: Hooked on what?
The Internet experience, the original Internet experience, that is, suggests an answer:
Other people.
People are the great, untapped resource. The richest possible experience you can give the user comes from putting another person on the other side of that interface. The most powerful filter for information is someone who knows that information well. The most interesting interaction you can have with a computer is one in which the computer merely mediates, facilitates, or enables conversation with another person. "Merely" is disingenuous, of course. From the right perspective, you can view all productive uses of computers as mediating or facilitating or enabling conversations between people.
And that is the right perspective.
The Internet experience shows that we have the ability to invent new modes of human interaction. What new modes are there to be invented? Ah, that's what you, the inventor, must discover, but one promising angle is the use of agents that represent people online.
Ultimately, I argue, the user interface should cease to be a human/computer interface and become a human/human interface.
And that's the real end of this column, except for this observation: Doing what I've suggested here would be a lot harder than slapping a happy face on a file structure and calling it "Bob," but it would also be a lot more meaningful and a lot more fun.
And that's the really, really, true end of this column. That's my theory, and if you don't like it_.
But no. I would never say to you, as they're saying these days around my water cooler, "If I want an opinion I'll call Judge Sporkin."
And that's the end.
editor-at-large
MikeSwaine@eworld.com
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