The Mythical Man-Finger

An interesting thesis to be sure, but his pictionary example highlights where it breaks down. Using a graphical UI is not like drawing a picture of what you want; it's manipulating a pseudo-physical interface using a mouse (for desktops) or your actual fingers (mobile devices and tablets).

In the real world, if you were sitting next to a stereo, would you prefer to instruct the person sitting next to you to load a song and hit play, or would you prefer to just do it yourself? That's the difference between a command line and a GUI: the difference between describing an action and performing it directly.

As for discoverability: saying you need to "know a language" to know that your song is in a folder, and that folders are nested, and that they reside on drives, ignores the fact that you need to know one for a command line too: you need to know the command "play" exists; you need to know that song names should be in double-quotes. You need to know the keyword "random" (rather than "shuffle"), and whether or not it understands commas.

In a GUI you can spot an icon with a musical note on it, and that's your first clue. Then you can poke around and see a round button with a triangle on it, a 40-year-old visual convention. The inherent discoverability of a visual interface is its primary advantage.

I clearly remember 15 years ago, sitting at a freshly-installed Linux command prompt, and being utterly frustrated. I wanted to explore the system, but didn't know the words. How do you discover "ls"? You can't even use "man" (if you knew about that, which I didn't) because you need to know the command in advance.

I like the premise of the article, but I feel there is an unspoken assumption made by the author that most people can touch-type or are willing to learn how.

Consider this command:

    play 10 random country then "Teenage Dream"

A proficient touch typist can rattle this off in < 10sec but a "hunt and peck" or other ad hoc typist will be essentially trading pecking at the screen with a finger on the mouse to pecking at the keyboard with the same finger.

My grandma struggles to use a computer. She has no real ability to scan a UI or intuit where she needs to click. She rarely remembers even basic operations, so she writes them down in a notepad, step by step:

1) Click on "File" in top left of screen 2) Click on "Print" in drop-down menu 3) On new screen, click little up arrow next to right hand number for more copies 4) Click "Print" button in bottom right of new screen

If she is unsure how to proceed or accidentally clicks the wrong thing, she has essentially no ability to recover; Her usual solution is to restart the computer and begin from scratch. Even after years of using a computer, she has no sense of what GUI metaphors mean and relies upon memorising a series of incantations by rote.

Unsurprisingly, she finds her computer to be frustrating, opaque and a little bit frightening. I have absolutely no doubt that she would be happier and more productive in a suitable CLI environment. I don't think she is alone in this and in many respects I feel that WordPerfect 5.1 was a high-water mark in computer usability. A modern GUI simply presents too much information for someone with a slow OODA loop to process. In a GUI, all actions are mutable and a user must constantly be aware of what mode they are in, what window is active, what menu is selected and so on. A CLI requires no situational awareness beyond the current working directory.

I think it's easy for mid-level users to forget the amount of accumulated knowledge they have, how honed their intuition is, how well they understand the implicit grammar of interfaces. When we view the world through the eyes of someone with no cognitive model of how a computer works, we can see that uttering incantations into a CLI is far more straightforward than trying to navigate the labyrinths of modern GUIs.

What usually puzzles me in all these discussions is the concept of keyboard shortcuts. They're a middle ground between GUI and command line (stretching the definition of middle ground a little). But my personal experience with people like my parents and even sometimes colleagues who use computers more than 3-4 hrs a day as part of their job is that there is a big aversion to keyboard shortcuts. I can't imagine how Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are in any sense harder than painfully clicking 2-3 times through hierarchical menus, but somehow my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that people just don't value time efficiency in a way power users do (or maybe that can be used to define power users).

Maybe understanding why keyboard shortcuts are used so little might help us understand why the command line has lesser adoption among the non-power users.

The command line has no affordance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

> “Yeah, but really complicated things are going to require searching through manuals.” Maybe, but you already do that in the GUI, and very often you have to do that to accomplish some of the simpler tasks above.

I think this guy is just arguing for the sake of hits to his blog...

(1.) How many power users check a manual to do advanced tasks on a GUI? I bet most of you use 'intuition'.

(2.) How often does your mum check a manual ...ever. How long does she wish to spend to understand how to work it?

(3.) When you're explaining over the phone how she can get the program to work do you wish to be explaining a list of commands that need to be typed exactly and in order: almost like teaching your mum how to code? Do you...

Meh, this is crazy talk... The metaphors that exist in GUIs are absolutely the reason that so many people are able to use and understand computers.

This ideology can only go so far.

Human brains work well when manipulating objects as they are being interpreted. A graphical UI is an extension of reality. We manipulate the UI until it reaches a desired goal. This is somewhat instinctive, while remembering commands is not as they must be learned before going further.

UIs are not the same in this way. A UI can be manipulated before having any knowledge of what it does, eventually giving an impression of its use.

Playlists, or media controls are easy. But what if you wanted to navigate a spreadsheet? Do I instinctively know that I have to type spreadsheet move to D:3? Not likely.

Clicking, dragging or scrolling on the other hand is much more intuitive to how humans interact with reality. This is true with early learning as well. Children are encouraged to learn shapes, colours and dimensions first as it is much easier than demanding them to know exactly what shapes, colours and dimensions are useful for in everyday life.

I really think the two paradigms can be combined: you can have a command line which makes suggestions as to what you mean (like tab completion), but also just takes what you've typed and works out what to display in response, even before you've hit enter. For instance, typing "play" may as well make a few suggestions as to what to type next, but also present a list of your favourite artists, so you can just click on one, or you can carry on typing.

A lot of people's fear of the command line is the empty imposing box, with a cursor and nowhere to look for help. I think we just need to help users exploring the interface, and maybe rename some of those cryptic commands, too.

It's a shame there's so little work in this field, really.

(I posted this comment there, too, for the record.)

As frosty pointed out, typing itself doesn't "just work" for lots of people. Moreover, command interfaces aren't ignored by the "just works" crowd: voice command has been a holy grail for years. It's typing that no one wants to do.

The concepts outlined in the article remind me of Ubiquity (the Firefox addon), particulary its combination of the speed of a shell with the discoverability and ease-of-use of a GUI.

For the few months that I used Ubiquity extensively, I felt like that was what exactly how computer interaction was supposed to work. Too bad they abandoned the app.

I think command-line is considered bad compared to the GUI is the lack of NLP/AI and the use of widely varying syntaxes and semantics for each command line argument.

For example, how do you know that the syntax "play 10 random country songs" would work? If it did work, would it play random (country songs) or (random country) songs? -- is country a type of music or a category to sort by?

The fact that everyone likes to classify things in different (and sometimes seemingly-illogical) ways leads to problems even if the syntax is well known - look at issues with SQL. Can you do "select id from company" on all databases?

Human communication is very difficult and error-prone, even for humans. Redundancy and back-forth is necessary to share understanding.

Perhaps we should simply acknowledge the fact that different people are... well, different.

For many years I worked with a guy who was probably about as good a programmer as I am, but with a very different mind.

My mind works on muscle memory: ask me what key combination I just hit to create a dummy function prototype, and I have to put my fingers on the keys and mentally read them off: he on the other hand, would think of it as control-shift-F.

He would code to country music - I couldn't code with any music with words to it (whether or not I could understand them).

Some people are more comfortable with GUIs, some with VUIs.

In XXIV century you speak to your computer and if you're supposed to point'n'click some panels, you do it in predefined special areas - it's modal work - you're occupied with one panel at time, not with dozens of overlapping windows. It's like some old games were operated. It's fun! ..and vastly different from what we use today for working.

But seriously..

I've added a followup post to yesterday's discussion here and in the comment-thread for the post itself.

http://lenz.unl.edu/2011/08/05/the-man-finger-aftermath.html

Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....

Different people learn differently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Fleming.27s_VAK...

Relevant unix koan: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....