Natural User Interfaces
Are Not Natural
donald a. norman
Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, KAIST Industrial Design | don@jnd.org
“I believe we will look back on 2010
as the year we expanded beyond the
mouse and keyboard and started
incorporating more natural forms of
interaction such as touch, speech,
gestures, handwriting, and vision—
what computer scientists call the
‘NUI’ or natural user interface.”
—Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft
May + June 2010
interactions
Gestural interaction is the
new excitement in the halls
of industry. Advances in the
size, power, and cost of micro-
processors, memory, cameras,
and other sensing devices now
make it possible to control by
wipes and flicks, hand ges-
tures, and body movements.
A new world of interaction is
here: The rulebooks and guide-
lines are being rewritten, or at
least, such is the claim. And the
new interactions even have a
new marketing name: natural,
as in “Natural User Interface.”
As usual, marketing rhetoric
is ahead of reality.
Fundamental principles of
knowledge of results, feed-
back, and a good conceptual
model still rule. The strength
of the graphical user interface
(GUI) has little to do with its
use of graphics: It has to do
with the ease of remembering
actions, both in what actions
are possible and how to invoke
them. Visible icons and visible
menus are the mechanisms,
and despite the well-known
problems of scaling up to the
demands of modern complex
systems, they still allow one to
explore and learn. The impor-
tant design rule of a GUI is vis-
ibility: Through the menus, all
possible actions can be made
visible and, therefore, easily
discoverable. The system can
often be learned through explo-
ration. Systems that avoid these
well-known methods suffer.
