Processing Power and User Power: The Benefits of Semantic Interaction

While having a computer understand your instructions without needing to select an option from a list may seem supremely modern, semantic interaction actually predates any form of user interface of the type we know today. The earliest microcomputer interfaces involved entering low-level instructions which the computer would then execute. As computers increased in processing power, increasingly abstract (high level) sets of commands were created. As a single command now represented multiple instructions which could be combined in many different ways, the number of available commands increased rapidly.

The perceived shortcoming of such a method of interaction was that the user needed to learn a reasonable (or in the view of some unreasonable) number of commands in order to accomplish a task. Thus menu-based interfaces were created, in which the user could select actions to be performed from a list without having to memorise the names of commands.

The reason why menu-based interfaces were created — dealing with a large number of commands — is also their shortcoming. A lengthy list of items becomes difficult to navigate. Such difficulty can be ameliorated by organising items into a hierarchical structure — a list which presents a set of lists and sublists, for example the menu bar found in programs such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. However, once menus are organised in a hierarchical structure, a user must memorise the location of a command in the set of menus, at least if any efficiency is to be expected. Doing so requires the same effort as learning the names of semantic commands.

Semantic interaction provides other benefits, for example the ability to execute a command based on a certain condition, or automatically run a command multiple times on different data. While menu-based systems may have less steep learning curves than sets of semantic commands, they offer the user comparatively less power and efficiency — the plateau at the top of the learning curve is much lower.