A video making its way around the blogosphere is this demonstration of a new desktop interface paradigm, using a metaphor of piles. This is a subject of some interest here at Adaptive Path—Dan’s master’s thesis in interaction design was on a project called File Piles. (A classic text in the world of human-computer interaction is the 1992 essay “A ‘Pile’ Metaphor for supporting casual organization of information,” which, unfortunately, you must pay for to read [though I’m sure the authors won’t see a penny of that!].)

After some discussion on an internal mailing list about the new demonstration video, I chimed in with my curmudgeonly two cents, offered here in somewhat edited form:

Watching that video was like watching a literature review of interface elements from the last 15 years.

Radial menus!

Pile metaphors!

Gestures and lassos and bears oh my!

While it’s pretty, and makes for good demo, it’s also distressingly *academic*, by which I mean, impractical and pretty much not at all useful. It assumes that we work in a world of a small enough number of digital documents to manage on a screen.

I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t.

The only new-fangled interface model I’ve seen in the last, I dunno, 5 years, that had any promise for the information blitzkrieg reality which we’re in is the Zooming User Interface

But, really, users do seem to satisfice with WIMP, and knocking it off its pedestal will prove remarkably difficult.

That last sentence of mine is based on having followed post-WIMP interfaces for 8 years, and seeing nothing emerge as a clear desirable alternative.