How would it feel?
Can I tell you a secret? What I love about interfaces is how it feels to use them.
One of the reasons I got so interested in user interface design is the zoomable interface the Raskin’s came up with. (I say Raskin’s because I feel that even if I looked, I’d be hard pressed to say where Jef’s work ended and where Aza’s began.)
When I first switched to a Mac, I felt a very peculiar sense of floating. Not floating on air or anything like that, but a definite sense that I wasn’t grounded, that there was jello beneath my feet cursor. Windows were haphazard all over the desktop, I was used to maximizing my XP Windows, stretching them tight over the monitor and nailing the corners in place.
I was almost ashamed of this feeling. I’d switched to a Mac because I loved the idea of Expose, of my windows flying around at the touch of a hot corner. Looking back, it was only a natural adjustment period. There’s a parallel here to how, when I first started playing guitar my fretting hand was closed tightly around the strings. I’d finger a chord and my hands would stiffen up, tendons tight. When I got better, I began to hold my hand lightly, using only enough pressure necessary. “Hands like water”, to butcher a karate saying. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “Mac loathing” out there is due to this sort of visceral discomfort?
Anyway, back to the zoomable interface, (have you tried it yet? this will make so much more sense if you do) I wonder how it would feel to use it for an extended period of time. Would I lose things? Would I feel cluttered? What if I didn’t plan out enough space for something and had to move everything around it over? Would my desktop reflect my state of mind even more? What would we do with “older things”? Would I get tired of zooming out and back in? Some of these questions would depend on how they were implemented but I wonder about those too. Would there be shortcuts to particular zoom levels? Would the penalty for context switching be a benefit in disguise? The lengthy time to zoom out making context switching much less desirable, and letting our minds clear out when we actually did switch?