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Human-computer interaction is undergoing a revolution, entering a multimodal era that goes beyond, way beyond, the WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers) paradigm. Now European researchers have developed a platform to speed up that revolution.

We have the technology. So why is our primary human-computer interface (HCI) based on the 35-year-old Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers paradigm? Voice, gestures, touch, haptics, force feedback and many other sensors or effectors exist that promise to simplify and simultaneously enhance human interaction with computers, but we are still stuck with some 100 or so keys, a mouse and sore wrists.

The EU-funded OpenInterface (OI) project took as its starting point the many interaction devices currently available – touch screens, motion sensors, speech recognisers and many others – and sought to create an open source development framework capable of quickly and simply supporting the design and development of new user interfaces by mixing and matching different types of input device and modality.

Jansen examined more than seven million interactions from hundreds of thousands of users to analyze the click-through patterns on both sponsored and non-sponsored links. Specifically studying the rate of clicks where the sponsored and non-sponsored ads are presented together, Jansen was investigating what effect this had on consumer behavior. "I was expecting that an integrated list of sponsored and non-sponsored ads would have a higher click through on the sponsored ads," Jansen said. When the click-through rate turned out to be only 15 percent, Jansen was astounded.

for more than 35 percent of queries, there were no clicks on any result.

Web searchers are smart," Jansen said. "They have a good idea what Web ads are and how to distinguish them from other links."