I was introduced to TRIZ during 2003. It attracted my attention as a sound logical methodology for problem solving and inventing. Soon I got very much involved in learning TRIZ as much as possible. I also started experimenting the applicability of TRIZ methodologies in different situations in my client organizations. However I experienced a lot of resistance from among the people I interacted. I will use this article to share my experience, both good and bad, as a TRIZ trainer in Indian context.

Although a GUI is considered to be convenient it still has certain shortcomings like ambiguity of pictorial symbols, difficulty of cursor movements, difficulty of interacting with smaller graphic elements, likeliness of making mistakes by slip of fingers, demand of more screen space, difficulty of searching in nested containers etc.

Many users fail to operate a computer satisfactorily because of the special skill or training required to operate it. In order to avoid this problem, it is necessary to design the user interface in such a way that even an untrained user should also be able to operate the computer effectively and efficiently.

Many inventions on assistive features like “screen zooming features”, “improving navigation”, “tactile interfacing”, “speech and hearing”, “features for visually impaired” are discussed in other articles. The six patents analyzed in this article try to improve the user friendliness of the GUI by using status indicators, relocating graphic elements in easily accessible locations and displaying meaning and function of icons and other graphical elements.

The modern software tools provide numerous graphic elements in their GUI, which demand more and more screen space. As the size of a display screen cannot be extended beyond a limit, it is typically seen as a constraint in a graphical user interface.

Looking from a TRIZ perspective, the computer screen should display all the information that the user needs (Ideal Final Result). There are various methods of addressing the problem of screen space, some of which are, ”using icons for windows”, “the desktop metaphor”, “the large virtual workspace metaphor”, “multiple virtual workspaces”, “overlapping windows” and “increasing dimensions” etc.

There are many inventions on how to maximize the presentation of information on a graphical user interface. This article analyzes nine inventions from US Patent database from a TRIZ perspective illustrating how they solve the contradictions in order to achieve the desired result.

Although a GUI is a revolutionary development over its predecessors, it suffers from a typical shortcoming that it requires a lot of pointer movements. As pointer movement is a slow process it affects the overall performance of a GUI operation. Besides too much pointer movement can frustrate a user. Hence, it is desirable to reduce the pointer movements while performing any action through a typical GUI.

Ideally the user need not move the pointer to initiate a GUI based operation. In other words the pointer itself should automatically move onto the desired location on the graphical user interface (Ideal Final Result).

This article analyzes the problems involved in pointer movements, finds out the specific GUI activities that demands more pointer movements and suggests specific methods that can reduce pointer movements. The methods include reducing the distance to access the remote menu items, automating the process of resizing and relocating windows and toolboxes, bringing the desired menu or command near to the cursor location instead of needing the cursor to move to the menu or command location.