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.

This week Fox News’ Diane Mercado interviewed Gary Fry, CEO of Global Graphics, when he was in New York. The topic was how to increase productivity in the workplace by the way you use your software.  Interesting to see that Diane identifies with the problem of wasting time on reformatting information to bring it into a report from the days when she was a PR Assistant.  Gary makes the point that, particularly in today’s economic climate, businesses should be looking at what this wasted time is costing them.  IDC, for example, counts the cost for an organisation employing 1,000 office workers as $5.7 million annually lost on reformatting information between applications.  With gDoc Fusion you can pull information together in minutes.  See the interview here

Here’s Global Graphics’ top eight tips for improving productivity. We all waste time each week assembling, compiling and sharing different documents so we’ve put together these valuable recommendations to help you improve your daily desktop computing productivity.
1. Combine pages from your Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents together in one file with one simple drag and drop document software program
2. View multiple documents at the same time in one viewing pane
3.   Use one viewer that can handle multiple file formats – you don’t need to have MS Office installed
4.  Browse through large documents quickly to find what you want by flicking through pages on screen like you would with a printed document. This saves time and money on printing out large documents too.
5. Create PDFs in one click by having a PDF creator icon in your MS Office toolbar.
6. Repurpose documents for sharing, posting on the web or printing in one software program
7. Edit, comment and review PDFs using the editing tools that are on the page you are working with so you don’t need to waste time searching for them  
8. Convert PDF to Word for more extensive redrafting
Of course we’d recommend you use gDoc Fusion to carry out these tips which you can download here  http://www.globalgraphics.com/en/gdoc/