After the GUI

Some time ago (perhaps five or six years ago) I watched a demo of a new version of Microsoft's Visual Studio. The new version (at the time) had a new feature: the command search box. It allowed the user to search for a command in Visual Studio. Visual Studio, like any Windows program, used menus and icons to activate commands. The problem was that Visual Studio was complex and had a lot of commands -- so many commands that the menu structure to hold them all was enormous, and searching for a command was difficult. Many times, users failed to find the command.

The command search box solved that problem. Instead of searching through menus, one could type the name of the command and Visual Studio would execute it (or maybe tell you the path to the command).

I also remember, at the time, thinking that this was not a good idea. I had the distinct impression that the command search box showed that the GUI paradigm had failed, that it worked up to a point of complexity but not beyond that point.

In one sense, I was right. The GUI paradigm does fail after a certain level of complexity.

But in another sense, I was wrong. Microsoft was right to introduce the command search box.

Microsoft has added the command search box to the online versions of Word and Excel. These command boxes work well, once you get acquainted with them. And you must get acquainted with them; some commands are available only through the command search box, and not through the traditional GUI.

Looking back, I can see the benefit of changing the user interface, and changing it in such a way as to make a new type of user interface.

The first user interface for personal computers was the command line. In the days of PC-DOS and CP/M-86, users had to type commands to invoke actions. There were some systems (such as the UCSD p-System) that used full-screen text displays as their interface, but these were rare. Most systems required the user to learn the commands and type them.

Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows used a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which provided the possible commands on the screen. Users could click on an icon to open a file, another icon to save the file, and a third icon to print the file. The icons were visible, and more importantly, they were the same across all programs. Rarely used commands were listed in menus, and one could quickly look through the menu to find a command.

Graphical User Interfaces with icons and buttons and menus worked, until they didn't. They were adequate for simple programs such as the early versions of Word and Excel, but they were difficult to use on complex programs that offered dozens (hundreds?) of commands.

The command search box addresses that problem. A program that uses the command search box, instead of displaying all possible commands in icons and buttons and menus, shows the commonly-used commands in the GUI and hides the less-used commands in the search box.

The search box is also rather intelligent. Enter a word or a phrase and the application shows a list of commands that are either what you want or close to it. It is, in a sense, a small search engine tuned to the commands for the application. As such, you don't have to remember the exact command.

This is a departure from the original concept of "show all possible actions". Some may consider it a refinement of the GUI; I think of it as a separate form of user interface.

I think that it is a separate form of interface because this concept could be applied to the traditional command line. (Command line interfaces are still around. Ask any user of Linux, or any admin of a server.) Today's command line interfaces are pretty much the same as the original ones from the 1970s, in that you must type the command from memory.

Some command shell programs now prompt you with suggestions to auto-complete a command. That's a nice enhancement. I think another enhancement could be something similar to the command search box of Microsoft Excel: a command that takes a phrase and reports matches. Such an option does not require graphics, so I think that this search-based interface is not tied to a GUI.

Command search boxes are the next step in the user interface. It follows the first two designs: command line (where you must memorize commands and type them exactly) and GUI (where you can see all of the commands in icons and menus). Command search boxes don't require every command to be visible (like in a GUI) and they don't require the user to recall each command exactly (like in a command line). They really are something new.

Now all we need is a name that is better than "command search box".