On this page, I distinguish between "artificial" and "natural" interactions, and propose that instead of relying on artificial interactions like mouse click sequences which must be memorized, or trying to emulate natural interactions like human speech, we instead try to develop formal subsets of natural interactions that are formalized enough for a computer to understand, but based on natural interactions which humans are apt to pick up.
Natural interactions
Natural interactions between a human and a computer make use only of skills and expecations from behaviors which we use commonly outside of computing. A fully natural language interface, for example, relies on our ability to speak with other humans, requires us to learn nothing more, and allows us to transfer our expecations of how a human reacts to speech and transfer them directly to the computer.
There is quite a bit of research in creating such interfaces, though it seems that there are many significant hurdles to unconstrained natural language interfaces. There are some fundamental difficulties with natural language interfaces. See my notes on Disambiguation of language in HCI.
Artificial interactions
Because of the difficulty emulating expressive natural interactions like speech, because of the difficulty of writing effective software programs, and because engineers are often in charge of designing human interfaces, most computer interactions are "artificial interactions." That is, they require users to learn new behaviors that bear little resemblance to more natural behaviors, and they require users to memorize expecations for the computer that have little resemblance to expections they have for other people and tools in their lives.
This creates a ...