Invisibility in user interface is a compelling notion. When one learns to type, the keyboard becomes a little more invisible then the daunting thing that it was when you started. More compelling to me is the UI of a car, which involves arms, feet, and eyes in a complex, yet seemingly natural dance involving thousands of pounds of vehicle. We can apply the notion of invisibility to more mundane objects, such as forks or chopsticks. To westerners, a fork is really almost transparent while chopsticks are more likely to be a skill learned in later life. In China, the opposite is likely the case. Learning to play tennis, as I am doing these days, is, in some real sense, about making certain motions and actions automatic - opening up the possibility of shifting our mental attention to more strategic things. For example, telling myself to keep my chin up and watch the ball all of the way through a serve will hopefully be unnecessary in some not too distant future and then I can focus on where I want to place the serve and what kind of spin I might want to impart, etc. This is not unlike learning the keys on the keyboard so that we need no longer look at our fingers and instead focus on the words and associated thoughts. These learned things, once automatic, are invisible to our conscious and they, in some real sense, become part of our being. The quality of a UI might be judged by how easily we internalize and make invisible its interface. The mouse, for example, seems much more natural then the keyboard (albeit, they serve totally different functions). A more recent UI device - 3DConnexion's Space Navigator is a surprisingly intuitive device for coarse motions in 3D with six degrees of freedom (three translational and three rotational). I now regularly use a small mouse with a track-wheel in my right hand for scrolling and fine motion and Space Navigator in my left hand for coarse motion; they work very well together.
An interesting historical note about the keyboard is that for a long time it was not really considered a device for ordinary consumption. My father, for example, did not learn to type till much later in life. In his era, secretaries served as an intermediary between the spoken (as in shorthand) or handwritten word and the typed word. The explosive growth of the computer made this interface untenable and the idea of secretaries as transcribers has become more of a specialty - for example, in legal settings. To me this is a good indication as to how poor a UI the keyboard really is - its invention almost immediately produced another interface to simplify its use.
The notion of good UI vs bad UI can then, in some sense, be associated with how much work we have to do to make it invisible. This is not quite enough, however, because we need also to consider the utility of what we get in return. A car takes quite a while to learn but the return on investment, in our current culture, is very high so people are willing to do a lot of work to master the UI. In the future, when we have auto-navigated, cooperative transport - for example, with GPS, traffic monitoring with traffic light awareness, and flocking control (automatic spacing of cars) - then we will look back at the car's UI and say "how did anyone ever learn how to use that thing?" The keyboard gets a little reprieve in this regard - speech recognition has been around for a while now and it does not seem to serve the function of a keyboard in spite of its apparent naturalness.
The focus of my interest is in making new UI so this discussion might productively end with a question:
What elements of UI are naturally invisible?
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