Zooming

I know I lean to the left in many things, but why can't I turn my image a quarter turn clockwise. After thirty years helping folks use computers as a sysadmin at UCSF, I found Jef Raskin and got to spend seven years with him before he so rudely died. First I helped by nitpicking over the manuscript for "The Humane Interface" and later got involved with Archy for a while. That died poorly, though Aza Raskin did a nice demo in Flash. Now he's pursuing zooming as a user experience fellow at Mozilla. Jef had described a hospital information system which used zooming. The one's I'd seen before were monstrosities that required weeks of training before they let you touch a keyboard. What Jef didn't say in the book was that novices became confident and competent with less than one minute of training. Measured. And computer experts got it in less than TWO minutes. I thought that was great. It means professors and grandmothers have a chance at it. But that system used two mouse buttons for zoom in and out. They have the same problem as joy sticks that you have to time their use to get the magnification that you want. But wait, I said, we already know the exact right magnification for every point in the X, Y plane. What if we make the zooming completely automatic? The designer of the zoom world should arrange it nicely, and you probably want visible borders so the zooming is not always a shock when it happens as you mouse around, but that's not really a big problem. I attribute the rapid learning and ease of use to the fact that for tens of millions of years our ancestors made it back to the nest or we wouldn't be here. Thus geographic navigation comes easily to us. We don't forget where the refrigerator is or the couch. Now that I live in a retirement mobile home park, I am surrounded by people who are frightened by computers. I think they could handle the zooming UI. When we use even Chrome, if we click on a link, the way back is to click on an arrow way up in the corner. Really different. Much better I think to just mouse back across that visible border. And long drop down menus are not easy to remember or mouse to, compared to even multi-level pie menus. Our objective ought to be to teach the fingers how to operate the computer so our thoughts can remain on the content, the reason we are at the machine. We do not go to the theatre to watch the projector, and we don't (well we may, but most users don't) go to the computer to deal with the program. They go for the content. Modal dialog boxes should be banned. They are GUARANTEED to break our train of thought. Oh, I am rambling on. More on many topics is at Nitpicker.pbwiki.com and the JustGo is about this kind of zui while the part about "The Humane Interface" is what Jef extracted as principles and rules from his book. He actually did it in a letter to Tom Gilb who Is my project management guru. He's pretty much the only one I know who explicitly seeks to have numeric goals for qualities like learnability and usability. See "Competitive Engineering" for details. Now you know more than you wanted to about me and my aspirations.