Do what I want!

I was thinking about this after having played around with Wolfram Alpha. Actually what sparked this post was having seen so many tweets about it mistaking it for a search engine. The tagline of Wolfram Alpha is “computational knowledge engine”, not something like “find what you are looking for” or “let me find that for you?”

But people don’t read taglines very carefully and when they do they don’t think about them too seriously. They use past experience to parse the service and charge ahead accordingly.

In trying to keep it simple, and to develop a more natural language approach to the input field, the designers of the interface present a single text entry field followed by the plus sign [=] to communicate put your input here, click to see what we can compute from that.

The problem is that most people associate a plain input field with a submit button as = Google, not a computational knowledge engine. If you scan complaining tweets you will notice that the authors hit the [=] with a DWIW intention, expecting a search result, not computational knowledge.

We are living in the pre-dawn of a new age of human-computer interaction. Eventually we will get to the point at which a single input field (with textual, audio or even electro-neurological input) will  be semantically, behaviorally and contextually (time, place, device) aware — getting us that much closer to a true DWIW command. This will require a lot of groundwork, but seeing as though folks like Wolfram, Tim Berners-Lee and an army of others are on the case, I expect to see really cool developments becoming more commonplace over the next 5-20 years