Shark: Why do people like this gadget-geek gimmick?

This morning I stumbled across a news story on IBM's Shark. No, not the enterprise storage system -- this is a research project whose name is a sort-of-acronym for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding.

Yes, click on the link. Please. (Here it is again, if you don't want to reach back into the previous paragraph.) It'll save me having to try to describe this input system intended for cell phones, tablets and handhelds. (For the link-impaired, you use it sort of like an on-screen keyboard, but instead of using a stylus to tap each key in turn, you draw a continuous line from one key to the next.)

Yeah, I know it's not new. People have been writing about it since last October, when it showed up on IBM's alphaWorks new-technology site. It recently got a new round of publicity when the San Jose Mercury saw yet another demo in preparation for a new version that should show up on alphaWorks soon. And everyone seems to be mightily impressed by it.

And I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Sure, it's a clever hack. But it's not likely to be faster or more accurate than tapping on an on-screen keyboard. It's probably less fatiguing than those thumb keyboards, but the main reason they exist is that people didn't want to use a stylus, which is required for Shark. It's nowhere near as natural as pseudo-handwriting systems like Graffiti.

And sure, it's a new and different approach. But that's not automatically a good thing. Shark doesn't reuse typing skills. It doesn't reuse handwriting skills. In short, it's a gadget-geek's approach to the problem: unfamiliar, nonintuitive and clumsy.

But don't we have enough bad ideas in user interfaces already?

The rule remains the same: The more similar something is to what people are already accustomed to doing, the more quickly they'll be productive with it and the less likely they'll be to reject it. That's a principle that applies to business processes, information presentation and lots of other things IT people are involved in designing.

But it really, really applies to user interfaces.