The CommonPoint system's value to users

The CommonPoint human interface offers an advantage to users over existing systems because it fully supports three of their main activities:

The People, Places, and Things metaphor describes the elements in the CommonPoint human interface and grounds them in classifications that people find useful in the real world. People, Places, and Things builds on real-world knowledge. It is built with a rich vocabulary of objects and is naturally extensible.

With People, Places, and Things, users interact with a diverse range of familiar objects, using a consistent language of gestures and representations. Because it is organized around user tasks and not around applications, the CommonPoint human interface makes each task easier and more enjoyable and minimizes the effort users spend on computer operations that are unrelated to their work.

Creating and customizing

Most of the user's work centers on creating or modifying information, especially documents. The CommonPoint human interface enhances productivity by providing greater flexibility in structuring information into documents. Unlike the monolithic application, the CommonPoint interface is built on smaller, more modular data components and tools that the user pulls together to suit a task. Pervasive support for direct manipulation, multiple levels of undo, and a document model that does not require saving combine for greater ease of use and safety of data.

Finding and organizing

Users require their computers to organize and find the information they create. The CommonPoint human interface supports content-based retrieval, organization by data properties, and linking within and across documents. It also introduces a new organizational concept based on the idea of a location or space, which is referred to as a Place element, that provides new capabilities for structuring tasks and information. Place elements enable the separation of work into meaningful contexts based on users, projects, and tasks.

Communicating and collaborating

Much of what users do involves collaborating and communicating with others. The basic foundations of the CommonPoint human interface are organized around the need for users to work together. Through the consistent presentation of People elements, Place elements, documents, and other objects, the CommonPoint human interface will make possible an entire spectrum of collaboration models.

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