Considering how many hours a day I spend in front of one, interacting with computers is a big part of not just my science but my life as well. For a long while, refining interactions with computers hasn’t been about the big things but rather the little ones; developing easy and intuitive methods of scrolling, rather than bringing back the debate between QWERTY and DVORAK. What anyone who deals with computing on a daily basis realizes, it’s the small things that make or break an interface – and one of the reasons I don’t currently see Open Office as being a real viable competitor to Microsoft Office any time in the near future. Every ounce of efficiency makes a big difference in not only the amount of work you’re able to get done, but the experience as a whole.

However, there’s often moments for the big changes – the new paradigms. These are the innovations where the jump in efficiency outweighs the inertia of the way we currently view the system. Arguably, this occurred with the development of graphical user interfaces. If you look at software applications prior to the days of a common GUI under a Windows or Macintosh system, say something like the original versions of Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect, they may not have been intuitive but once you were proficient, you could do pretty much anything with incredible speed and accuracy. I’d argue that it was the intuitiveness of GUIs and their ability to make computers accessible to the general public that tipped the scale.

As for a potential new paradigm, I’d like to introduce 10/Gui. It’s a system that’s based on using all 10 fingers to increase the amount of interaction that you can have with a computer at any given time. I’m not sure if I’ll see anything like this in my next laptop search, or even the one after that, but I can already see the advantages of a system constructed this way. Take a look:

Watch the video!