gDoc

OK. This isn’t “Annie Get Your Gun” but it was this song title that came to mind the other day when I reflected back on the subject of Natural User Interfaces (NUI). Having been to a conference recently the buzz word is NUI. Bill Buxton and others refer to it often and I think it’s great because for me it is the only way to make modern day software easier to use.

It’s been touted before of course with different terminology but in the past hardware could not deliver and in most cases still does not deliver all that is needed to get a 100% NUI. Often though it’s also the software that is lacking because the user interfaces are not designed to give the user that natural experience; naturally.

My wife looks after and teaches children of ages ranging between 2 to 12 and is a qualified Montessori teacher. In a nutshell the Montessori method advocates teaching only via concrete objects in a real environment. When I can I observe some of the children as they develop and learn. It’s amazing to see the difference when children are taught with real world physical objects as opposed to abstract concepts, how well they learn and how confident they are to use what they know. The same applies to software users. The more the tool works naturally the easier it is to learn, use and understand how it works. Simple!

In gDoc Fusion that is how we designed the Assembly View. If you need to merge two physical documents into a single document using parts of each, you would unbind them, lay them out on a table page by page and play solitaire with the pages until you organised them as you wanted then stapled the result into a single document.

That is exactly the way the Assembly View works. You can open two or more documents, they display in rows of single pages so you can see their content then you can select one or more pages, drag them and merge into a single document. Simple, intuitive and natural; NUI.