Interfaces, metaphors & multi-touch

Why computers suck

The Mac embellished Xerox’s GUI by adding new metaphors. The biggest of these were the desktop and trashcan. The desktop was designed to represent, well, your desk top. However, it's not exactly the best design idea of all time.

Sure, you can stick a few files on the desktop, or put them in folders - but all Desktop style OS’ tag extras into the metaphor. Think about it this. To access you files in Windows you have to go through My Computer which sits on your desktop. If the Holy Grail of interface design requires that the system be transparent (ie you don’t need to know about the inner workings of the computer to operate it), then the My Computer icon isn’t a gateway to understanding – it’s a red flag.


When all we used to do was view a couple of websites, read an email, or play a game the desktop was fine; but now, Apple and Microsoft want us to buy all our movies, TV shows, and music online – as well as plan our holidays, run our businesses and transfer them to our respective media devices. Even on a 1,920x1,200 display you can only display three or four documents at a time, with the rest clogging up the taskbar.

You might not think that’s a problem, WindowsXP works well enough, and the new 3D desktops like XGI and Vista look beautiful with their wobbly windows and exciting gimmickry. But the way we interact with those systems is based on a 25-year-old design: so maybe we shouldn’t be so attached.

There are alternatives to the desktop metaphor - Dennis Chao entertainingly demonstrated this by taking the spawning and killing metaphors used by UNIX to extremes - by representing them in the Doom engine. In this UI a monster represents each running program, then you kill the processes with a shotgun. It’s a silly metaphor, and a dubious UI but it does sort of work. You could probably extend and break the metaphor by upgrading it to a HL2 mod and using the gravity gun to tote your files around. It would work after a fashion, much like the Desktop metaphor works now.