Gui vs nui

Dennis wixon's talk at uxweek 08 and august's recent toronto talk at rotman and ocad returns me to thoughts around graphical UI vs natural UI. For platforms that have to work on both touch and non-touc devices, this is a struggle. Blackberry has non-touch roots and is menu-driven. Its foray into touch is constrained by the legacy of menus. Natural user interfaces of touch devices is characterized by transparency. The interface affords all possible actions; nothing is hidden. Gestures are natural. Affordances are natural. But menus are fundamentally hidden UI. Nokia has the same challenge. Windows mobile has early roots in touch with the pocket pc that was still gui in that the touch aspect was more of a mouse direct manipulation metaphor. So Ppc was menu driven. Iphone and palm are largely NUI. Android interestingly is a mix; most interactions are on the screen but they make use of very light weight menus (5 memu items vs the 50 you might find on BlackBerry). With nokia revamping their OS in a few years, I wonder how they will bridge touch and non-touch into one experience.

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