Heuristics in real user interfaces

It is the conventional wisdom in user interface design that direct manipulation is best and that interfaces should be predictable. This tends to argue against having a system “guess” or use heuristics or other AI approaches. However, an increasing number of today's successful software products do use heuristics in their interfaces. The heuristics are used to help guide the user and to perform tasks that would be too difficult to specify by conventional direct manipulation approaches. We believe that user interface designers will increasingly need to consider using heuristic techniques in their interfaces. This panel discusses a number of today's successful products using heuristics and the important HCI design issues such as feedback.