CLI: the future UI?

Don Norman, author of "The Design of Everyday's Things", always gives a look to the future.

What are the UIs becoming? Are they more oriented on the semantic than on the visual aspects of the human-computer interaction? Norman describes his view:

Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were – and still are – valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today’s systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see them, now you don’t. Now you see them again. And they will get better and better with time: mark my words, that is my prediction for the future of interfaces.

In this article the author underlines also how search engines behave and are seen as answer engines:

The real surprise, though, is that search engines have migrated to becoming answer engines, controlled through a modern form of command line interface.We navigate the internet by typing phrases into our browsers and invoking our favorite search engine. But more and more, we type in commands, not search items. All the major search engines now allow commands to be typed that directly yield answers without the need to go to an intermediate webpage.

In my opinion the examples presented here are meaningful: the idea the GUI are going to be replaced by Command Line Interfaces is applicable only for applications or services which require a linguistic interaction to find answers.

For real-time communication services, for example, an immediate, intuitive graphical user interface will remain the best choice (think about the direction drawn by iPhone).




Disclaimer for quoted material:

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2007. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included.

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, Donald Norman, GUI, CLI