Gestural interfaces: A step backwards in usability
"But the place for such experimentation is in the lab."
That's a silly, elitist statement. No matter how much testing you do in the lab, the ultimate test is in the hands of end users. Lots of dumb WIMP UI ideas, like modal dialogs, MDI windows, and nested menu hierarchies, survived the labs at Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft, but fell out of favor over years of real user experience. On the other side of the coin, lots of now-popular desktop and web UI elements were conceived by run-of-the-mill developers far from any research campus. As the new-car smell wears off touch devices, plenty of touch UI conventions will get drop-tested in the wild, the stupid ones will get discarded, and the good ones will get copied by everyone and become taken for granted. This will happen far faster in the cutthroat app marketplace, under the eyes of millions of customers, than in any HCI lab.
A good first step may be to have a standard way to show the gestures that are currently enabled (e.g. pinch, swipe). That way, you at least know what is significant to the current app in the current mode, and don't have to try a bunch of things.
Though in some respects, it is unfair to criticize touch technology based on its initial use in phones, because those screens are small. Some of the article's goals aren't practical on a small screen, e.g. GUIs have "discoverable" interfaces because of always-visible menus, but a phone can't do this without seriously reducing usable screen space.
On the other hand, the touch screen of an iPad probably should fix more of these problems. For instance, an iPad app can probably have a discoverable "menu bar" like a Mac app does, and not really hurt usable screen space.
I had to laugh: when pushing the 'menu' button in Android:
> (The keyboard does not always appear. Despite much experimentation, we are unable to come up with the rules that govern when this will or will not occur.)
So apparently these 'user interface experts' have been unable to figure out what I and everybody else I know managed to understand implicitly without any particular effort: that a long press is a different action to a short press. No wonder they think it is a poor UI - they must be utterly confused all over the place. But honestly, this is a fairly common UI concept in space / button limited devices. I somehow doubt they are really as 'expert' as they suggest if they haven't come across this before.
Key criticisms:
"gestures cannot readily be incorporated in menus: So far, nobody has figured out how to inform the person using the app what the alternatives are."
"Accidental activation is common in gestural interfaces, as users happen to touch something they didn't mean to touch. It may not even be obvious what action got you there. If a finger accidentally scrapes an active region, there is almost no way to know why the resulting action took place. The trigger was unintentional and subconscious."
"When a mouse is clicked one pixel outside the icon a user intended to activate, the mouse pointer is visible on the screen so that the user can see that it's a bit off. [On a touch screen] Users frequently touch a control or issue a gestural command but nothing happens because their touch or gesture was a little bit off. Since gestures are invisible, users often don't know that they made these mistakes."
"When users think they did one thing but "really" did something else, they lose their sense of controlling the system because they don't understand the connection between actions and results. The user experience feels random and definitely not empowering."
"Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach."
So much for innovation.
It’s hard to tell what they’re actually saying here other than that a newly popular, relatively open platform has some bad UIs. Why’s it gotta sound so grouchy?
nice background color. and they presume to talk about usability?