Generations of User Interfaces
Computers are such an integral part of our everyday life. Now, most people take them and what they have added to life totally for granted. Even more so the generation who have grown from infancy within the global desktop and laptop revolution since the 1980s. The history of the computer goes back several decades however and there are five definable generations of computers. Each generation is defined by a significant technological development that changes fundamentally how computers operate — leading to more compact, less expensive, but more powerful, efficient, and robust machines. Along with each generation of computing, the user interface also evolved accordingly. when we consider the generations of the user interface, we can find several distinct generations
Batch System
This is the first generation of user interface which was not interactive at all. Batch systems can be said to involve zero-dimensional interfaces in that the interaction between the system and the user was restricted to a single point in time: the submission of the batch job as a single unit. In the old days, the users wrote up a sequence of operations to be executed (typically on punched cards, a job), and handed them to the operator to be loaded. The operating system took such a batch of commands to execute off its input queue, ran them until the end (or something failed), and took the next one. Output was collected (probably printed out) to return to the user. the main advantage of this type of user interface is this can be run without user supervision. this is helpful when we want to do some repetitive tasks. So even with the modern systems, they still get the help of some form of batch capability. Apart from the traditional batch systems are that email and fax interfaces often can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Line-Oriented interfaces
A user interface based on a user editing individual lines of text at a time, especially with regard to early text editors. In such systems, instead of moving around in the document as in screen-oriented editors or graphical user interfaces, the user could enter commands to list outlines within a document or could specify a line to edit. The user could edit an individual line by inserting and removing characters and moving the cursor left and right. While this level of interaction seems quite primitive, it was largely dictated by the constraints of the technology (some line editors used line printers as the output device, rather than CRTs) and by the speed of interaction with shared computers.
Line-oriented interfaces were simply one-dimensional interfaces, as seen in the previous figure, where the user was only able to communicate with the device on a single line that acted as the command line. Once the user had reached the return key, no further changes could be made to the input.
Since line-oriented interfaces did not permit users to switch across the screen, their interaction methods were often restricted to question-response dialogs and parameter command typing. Question-answer dialogues involve computer-induced conversations where the user responds one at a time to the computer’s questions.
Most line-oriented user interfaces were based on command languages of different types, and the proper collection of command names required much early research in the user interface area.
Full-Screen Interface
Transforming the interface design space from one to two dimensions. Form-filling dialogs are a typical use of the full screen, where the user is presented with a variety of number fields that can be modified in whatever order the user wants. In modern interfaces, form fill-in also remains in the form of dialog boxes, but dialog boxes are more complex than conventional models since they can include pop-up menus and other ways to allow the device to support the user when filling out the form.
Many full-screen interfaces often use feature keys as the main interaction type, in addition to menus. A function key is, in theory, just a bundle of a full command into a single lexical operation for the user. Two primary benefits of feature keys are that they operate as accelerators of interaction and that there are so few of them that users can always learn them by heart. Since the precise meaning of a function key may rely on the cursor-pointed screen object, some uses of function keys allow an early approximation of modern mouse-based interfaces’ point-and-click interaction design.
Graphical User Interfaces
The history of the GUI is going back to 1962, but those experimental steps didn’t see widespread commercial use until the 1980s. The majority of modern user interfaces belong, after their specific elements, to the group of graphical user interfaces often referred to as WIMP systems (windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device). Because of the probability of overlapping windows, window interfaces incorporate almost a third dimension to the two dimensions inherent in each window. It is obvious that overlapping windows are not actually three-dimensional because, without shifting them to the top, it is not practical to see the material of obscured windows, so it’d be more precise to refer to these interfaces as being two-and-a-half dimensions.
Direct manipulation is the main interaction method found in many graphical user interfaces and is centered on the visual representation of dialog artifacts of interest to the user.
It can be seen that most of the graphical user interfaces are object-oriented. In comparison to the function-oriented interfaces that were the conventional character-based interface framework, object-oriented interfaces are. The interaction is organized around a series of commands provided by the user in different combinations in a function-oriented GUI to obtain the desired outcome.
Many interface experts agree that graphical user interfaces typically have stronger usability properties than character-based interfaces, especially for beginner users with regard to learning. There is not much hard scientific proof to prove the dominance of interactive interfaces, in view of this popular assumption. A graphical file system was compared with a command-line operating system from one of the few experiments [Margono and Shneiderman 1987] and found that inexperienced users were able to execute a series of file manipulation tasks in 4.8 minutes while making 0.8 errors with the graphical interface since the same functions took 5.8 minutes and involved 2.4 errors with the command-line interface. The graphical interface was also highly favored by consumers, earning it a satisfaction rating of 5.4 on a 1–6 scale, whilst the command-line interface was rated at 3.8.
The Graphical interfaces may often be too natural and compelling, notably if user assumptions are not matched by the real system.
Next-Generation Interfaces
In laboratories worldwide, the next generation of user interfaces is now under development. The pattern from past decades is likely to persist and the dimensionality of user interfaces is likely to rise from the present 2.5 to a maximum of 3 (or more) dimensions. Therefore, the two easiest projections for the next generation of user interfaces are that they will provide greater dimensionality for more forms of media and that they will be extremely portable and intimate while using cellular modems and other networking technologies to achieve tight connectivity. Furthermore, it is possible that user interfaces of the next generation will be more object-oriented in terms of their features and not just in terms of data manipulation.
Examples for next-generation interfaces are,
- Brain-Computer Interface.
- Flexible OLED display.
- Augmented Reality (AR).
- Voice User Interface (VUI)
- Gesture Interfaces.