The No-Click User Interface
September 19, 2006I was just updating another one of my blogs, and then all of the sudden came upon this site, taking over my screen. It just all of the sudden appeared, leaving me really no choice but to obey. A page came up, commanding me not to click anything. It’s sort of like, “don’t press that red button.”
But then, a whole site came up, entirely dedicated to developing a no-click user interface! It is a wild, incredible site with all sorts of test buttons and controls, recording your mouse movements and then based on such allowing you to rapidly navigate the UI without actually clicking on a single thing!
Brilliant!
Except, it left me to wonder what the precise purpose and implications of this are. What would I be doing with my life if I didn’t have to click? Would it give me more spare time? Would it allow me to spend more time with my wife? Would it make me stop drinking coffee? I can’t tell. If I were possessed of some problem in muscle function whereby I couldn’t click and could only move the mouse and pound my forehead against the keyboard or something, this may come in handy. However, logic would then seem to indicate that if that were the case, I would have a rough time making the intricate mouse movements needed to be able to navigate a no-click interface as well.
Left me in a bit of a mystery, but an intriguing concept nonetheless.
This is actually quite wild. It reminds me of the opening scene of Minority Report – where Tom Cruise is standing in front of that big screen sorting images using hand guestures. Perhaps more UIs like this will pave the way for more sophisticated human interface devices in the main stream.
Right now there of course isn’t much demand for such things, but that’s really just because it hasn’t been created with useful software that can be driven by such an interface. I guess only time will tell.
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True – and with something like Minority Report, where you have some other UI input device than a two-button mouse, it becomes a much more pervasive sort of a project. I think mice were meant to be clicked on, though.
[…] A blogger who goes by the alias Jettero Heller on Engineering a New World seemed to have the same “So what?” attitude as me. […]