[ge-talk] UI ideas

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Hi Ari,

On 1/5/07, Ari Haviv <arielbhaviv at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another idea I found was the zoomable UI
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/
> I think if this concept is going to work, zooming should show more objects
> and information and not make text size ridiculously large or tiny

The ZUI concept has its own issues. For me, the biggest one is that it
makes you care about spatial data locations and without a good tool
you'll have to clean up (reorganize) your world whenever you delete or
add a new item. They don't automate anything for you. Also, with lots
of files you won't really be able to work by zooming and scrolling
around in your virtual world. Search is still the primary tool for
finding data, so why should you care about locations, at all?

Zooming itself is nice for understanding what is happening, but it's a
slow process. In the end, you'll always want to get to the target
location with one single click instead of zooming. I also have the
impression that most of the ZUI studies use zooming as an alternative
for a very flawed model and then shout "Hurray! Conclusion: ZUIs are
the best!". There are nice concepts of ZUIs, but I don't think that
they are a good replacement for the Desktop model. I still can't
imagine how people will find it more effective/comfortable to scroll
by zooming out, panning, and zooming in.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald