Document oriented or Task oriented?

Martin — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:27:37 +0000

Do you write a text or do you want to share some information? Do you create a drawing or do you want to explain some idea?

I think the current desktop is either application- (Windows, Gnome) or document- (Mac OS X) oriented. But why? I don’t use my computer to open applications or create documents, I like to get a task done. I’d like an interface that is task oriented!

Task oriented design is a well known approach for interaction designers but somehow this never entered the desktop metaphor. The desktop is still mostly aimed at starting applications and handling files. Which is nice and important, but very inefficient. I think the desktop should be able to do those tasks for me. Gnome DO is quite good at finding the application I want to open, and Nautilus is quite good at organising files.

An idea would be to give the user the possibility to create tasks for itself. For example: I want to create a project plan, instead of: open OO Writer, select the project plan template and start writing. I hear you say: “You can use the templates for that!”. Indeed, I could, but then the flow would be: go to a folder where I want to create the plan, right click, find the template I want, create the file, name it, open it. Not efficient.

I’ve written a doc a while ago about a webbased task oriented desktop. Maybe I should expand that into something that fits on the desktop. Next holiday I’m going to work on that…

[Update]

Martin Notes » document oriented

Document oriented or Task oriented?