Andrew Robulack's Profile

The dark side of a direct manipulation interface is that you have to directly manipulate everything. Instead of an executive who gives high-level instructions, the user is reduced to an assembly line worker who must carry out the same task over and over.

Instead, electronic information should be modularized and presented in ways that encourage people to read as little as possible by popping information of interest to the specific user to the top, while enabling each user to link to backup information as needed. Object-oriented authoring and reading would allow the same piece of information to be presented at multiple levels and possibly from different perspectives.

A stateless interface is doomed to present the inappropriate message because it cannot relate the user's action to its own prior recommendation to delete files. The computer needs to build a deeper model of our intentions and history.

In order to deal more effectively with these objects, the computer needs a much richer representation of them. For a document, this representation could include its authors, topic matter, keywords, and importance; whether there are other copies; what other documents it is related to; and so forth.