October 11, 2005

| Superhero Physics >>

Jakob Nielsen gives a succinct overview of user interfaces from command-line to WYSIWYG. Clicking on menus to choose commands represented an improvement over command-line interfaces when the range of available choices was still small, Nielsen says, but today, menus provide a poor navigation interface. Noting Microsoft’s new UI announcement, Nielsen heralds the age of results-based user interaction, where you choose what you want your application to do by selecting from a gallery of possible outcomes.

Note that command lines aren’t exactly going anywhere. The other day, at a conference, Jarah Euston mentioned how fond she is of Yubnub, the Web’s command line. Anyone else using it?