Beyond WIMP

The WIMP (windows, icons, menus, point-and-click devices) graphical user interface (GUI) is not an ideal interface. Expert users find pure WIMP GUIs frustratingly slow and thus use keyboard shortcuts. In addition, they don´t scale well-GUI bloat accompanies feature bloat. The most serious limitation, however, is that WIMP GUIs were designed for keyboard-plus-mouse desktop computing environments-environments that takes advantage only of vision and primitive touch. Our goal should be to design user interfaces that match our human perceptual, cognitive, manipulative and social abilities. We want to interact as naturally with computers and intelligent devices as we communicate and collaborate with each other and as we manipulate our physical environments. Indeed, computers are increasingly being used to facilitate human communication, collaboration and social interaction. Therefore, we should increasingly focus on human-human interaction, not just human-computer interaction. This change in focus reflects not only changes in the mode of computer use but also the increasingly invisible nature of the computer in our environments. New environments must serve as forcing functions to give us far higher expectations for user interfaces than we have had previously. Furthermore, the potential of future interfaces for handicapped people is phenomenal. Thus, despite the technology challenges, the greatest challenge lies in our understanding of human capabilities and how to incorporate that understanding into new design tools, methodologies and user interfaces