Staying on-task

One of the major faults with Microsoft Windows is that you can get interrupted by lots of little Windows popping up. E.g. if you start an application, it can take a while for it to display, and in the meantime you are busy typing something else. Then there was the recent example of an anti-virus subscription notice popping up during a Powerpoint presentation.

This is clearly wrong. When you are doing something, nothing short of hell or high water should interrupt you. You should never ever be typing something, then some other window pops up and steals the input focus, and then midsentence you start typing commands into this dialog box which then closes and you feel uneasy that you may have just done something drastic and irreversible.

Whilst I like Windowing systems, I can't help feeling that most applications really should run full screen, with a notification area on the bottom in case something drastic happens (like you get a new email). The problem is that the Windows taskbar is cluttered and poorly configurable. Everything is so noisy and distracting. Just looking at my screen, I can see 165 different things I can click on, and a lot more if I opened any of the menus. I want to see nothing but the task I'm on.

I see the next big thing as being task-oriented user interfaces. Everything you do will be focused on performing, and guiding you through a task. This does go slightly against an exploratory approach, however you won't need to do so much exploration if the tasks are set up right.