Beyond WIMP: Designing NUIs to Sup- port Productivity Document Tasks

After decades of WIMP-based computing, a paradigm shift is occurring in the consumer device landscape as touchscreen appliances and applications invade the market. In the professional office world, however, WIMP software still prevails for so-called "productivity" work for lack of adequate modern solutions. In this paper, I argue that for this status quo to start to change, interface designers and engineers need to free themselves from their lingering WIMP influences and think outside the box to create tailored NUIs that fully exploit the potential of the available interaction capabilities of new hardware. In the research community, there are a great number of inspiring approaches that can be built upon to create powerful applications with practical appeal for businesses. I provide a few pointers and suggestions about how this can be achieved, taking the particular case of document authoring as example. Author