Slashdot Mirror
Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability
smitty777 writes "Veteran usability experts Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting article lamenting the current state of the art in gesture interfaces. According to them, the lack of standards for interacting with these devices puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted."
puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted.
Hmm... this has given me some good ideas for an iOS app I'm farting around with. However, I can't find how to add faux-BLINK tagged text and Geocities-type spinning, flaming skulls in Interface Builder...
Trolling is a art,
I've got your gestural interface right here!
What with all the OS companies trademarking the various gestures, there's no way they'll become standardized. Unfortunately.
Different companies are approaching a new type of device with new interfaces, and since they don't approach it like the decades-old windowed desktop environment, they are wrong.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
It's not surprising that this has come about again. It has been roughly one full generation of developers since 1994. During that time, those developers who actually learned proper usability techniques either retired or moved on to other endeavors. They knowledge they acquired and the methods they developed have basically been lost to the sands of time.
Today, we have a whole new generation of developers creating this shitty software. They'll spend the next 10 to 15 years learning what the previous generation had learned. There'll be a few years of good UI design before these developers move on, at which time the cycle will repeat.
Gesture based interfaces are a bit of a mixed bag, if they are done well (see the iOS pinch gestures) they work very well, but if badly implemented you end up accidentally triggering them all the time. Despite the age of the classic "object" based UI designs, they are still the best control method (in most cases), just because you can see what you are doing by what you hit.
Somehow, despite the lack of standardization among programs controlled through various keyboard command sequences (vi, emacs, lynx, mutt) people still manage to use them.
"The lack of standards for interacting with these programs puts us on par with the '78 vintage in console program design, when designers discovered they could make the keyboard command sequences do anything they wanted using any conventions they wanted."
FTFY
I'm not being sarcastic here, but this is why i've felt that the atrix i own is an inferior phone to the n900. In the n900, the upper corner always took you to the multi task screen where you could close the application out, and if you closed the app, it always worked. This was because it had a not-as-friendly-to-touch interface that was based of of linux guidelines. There was consistency, but if the button wasn't visible, all applications still responded to it (unless they were frozen, then a freeze popup would happen, allowing you to close).
This has been bugging me for the past few months with the android, and now i know why it just doesn't feel up to snuff. The android phone is the first phone i've ever owned that had mystery behavior.
It's not as if there aren't human interface guidelines in place for some of the gesture based environments in question. While not capital "S" standards, who cares?
Akin to the early days of GUI interfaces, we didn't have standards in the early days when the Amiga, Apple, Atari, BeOS, NeXT, Windows, OS/2, GEOS, CDE, roamed the earth. There was the Apple HIG, IBM's User Interface Guidelines and so on.
It didn't stop the awful Win95 interface from coming into existence, but so what. Let people create and innovate. We're all the better for it.
...the slashdot April fools ohmigodponies interface. It was the pinnacle of web design and nothing has come close since.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've got a single gesture in mind for folks who think that gesture-based interfaces are where it's at...
Actually, I do like the intuitive "pinch, spin, slide" type gestures with iOS, but for PC-based stuff, I can't stand a lot of the new, shiny crap folks are pushing. Removing useful things like status bars, and replacing intuitive "I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it" menus with those "trying to view the Grand Canyon through a toilet paper tube" restrictiveness of these ribbons and such... it just really gets annoying.
The Digital Sorceress
seeing as it has a standardized set of gestures including a standard gesture area. But it seems to focus exclusively on iOS and Android...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I thought with the title, it would be a social study about how gesturing at a computer like an ape instead of sitting down and calmly telling your equipment what to do (via text or speech) is a major steps backwards for humanity. How can people not realize that every new technology will go through a phase where everyone implements their own idea before the industry settles on a few good ideas?
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
Gesture based interfaces might not be perfect but they've sure expanded the use of smartphones well beyond the typical Treo and Blackberry crowd. The interface can't be that bad.
Now you kids with your loud music and your Dan Fogelberg, your Zima, hula hoops and gesture interfaces, don't you see? People today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Gestural interfaces are ok on a touch screen, but when using a mouse, I find they're just inconvenient.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
"on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted."
Yep, we've come a long way since then.
The best part about navigating Netflix and Hulu on my XBox 360 is the voice control--dead simple and unambiguous with straightforward voice command options on the screen if you need them. "XBox pause!" "XBox rewind!" You can mutter voice commands, talk slow (not too slow), talk fast, talk like a cartoon character and it just works. It feels like how the 21st century should feel like.
The hand gestures, on the other hand, are an exercise in frustration. The Kinnect is good at tracking your hand, but you still have to use a fine degree of motor control to move that little hand to the pause area of the screen. The requirement to use fine motor control for something that can be accomplished using a voice command or by simply pressing a button on a remote control is a STEP BACKWARDS. The gesture commands are OK for scrubbing through the videos, but only because you would be using a similar motion if you were using a controller or a mouse.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I turned off gestures on my Thinkpad almost right away. Waaay too easy to false-trigger. Any potential shortcut was more than negated by the false-triggering.
As for the poster who criticized touchpads, that's another story. I'll never go back to a mouse if I can avoid it. Sliding something over a desk seems like banging rocks together now. The trackpad has buttons in the same place all the time. It's a compact little rectangle that requires hardly any hand movement.
OTOH, I'm not terribly jazzed about sliding my mits all over a screen. I still want a real keyboard.
Neilsen's has always been a killjoy of web interactivity, regularly find new topics to gripe on in an attempt to appear relevant.
Gestural interfaces are ok on a touch screen, but when using a mouse, I find they're just inconvenient.
Yeah, mouse gestures were popular in Opera in, what, 2002? I think the difference is with a touchscreen they're the best you've got but with a mouse you have more expressive options.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Any interface I cannot grep through and trivially script is a step backwards.
From the link: "The usability crisis is upon us, once again."
is one that you create and are singularly able to solve.
I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. But there's a big advantage to pioneering a new physical interface: you don't need the language part of your brain. My 1 year old twin nephews can interact with their iPads with only the most basic of demonstrations of how a new app works. They can't read or write but they can follow demos of fingers creating action pretty well.
Is bringing along the old interface of mice & menus helping or hurting? I particularly like the new "swipe up" gesture to scroll down of a touchscreen rather than the traditional "elevator window" model of scroll bars where clicking up scrolls up.
They are absolutely to be commended for chastising developers that there is no easy way to discover actions if they are not intuitive; I'd rather they come up with ways to address this than just fall back on menus though. For example, Apple included an interactive tutorial for using the custom gestures built-in to Pages, Numbers and Keynote because they aren't discoverable at all. Some I've forgotten because I don't use them (and I'd have to re-watch the tutorials again to re-program my brain). But the ones I have picked up on are absolutely ingrained and effortless now. Unfortunately, built-in tutorials are the exception rather than the rule, and even when they are included they more trouble to refer to than a drop down menu. But there are ways to improve without eliminating gestures.
I wouldn't want to use the gesture interface when I'm programming during the day, but when I'm swiping through my early morning junk mail, RSS feeds, and to-do items, my brain feels far more engaged on my iPad than my desktop. It's almost like the touch gestures are autonomic and leave my (limited) higher brain functions alone to read though the fog (at least until my caffeine kicks in.)
I agree that people need to improve gesture interfaces which are in their infancy, but I don't think it's justified to throw the baby out with the bath water just because of long traditions.
Lets draw some parallels here... I'd say that point n click UI is most like that of the layout for a controller on a classic console. If you follow a standard UI you have certain buttons and menus that users can identify with. For example," _, [ ] and X " sit in the upper left or right hand corner of most application windows. Users expect these buttons(minimize, maximize and close) and use them regularly. Likewise, a classic controller layout like those from Sony and Microsoft includes directional buttons, face buttons and triggers. Game developers use the similarities in control layout to map their action buttons. Multi-platform games have near exact mappings and games within a particular genre use configurations that are similar to one another.
Contrast this to button mappings of a game on the PC platform. Developers have 108 keys and a mouse at their disposal. They can create and mandate some very confusing control layouts. Gesture controlled UI design has just as many, if not more, possibilities. As some users have mentioned, patenting gestures does not help create standards. This just means develops have to think of new ways(read: different buttons) for users to interact with their application.
Where's the point in all this? PC games can have some very confusing control sets. However They havent failed yet. Many gamers prefer them over consoles with a more limited set of controls. I think the confusion over gesture UI will fade and with time more people will learn to accept the nuances
That's like saying vintage '94 web design was a step back from menu and keystroke driven application design.
*Get your experts to evaluate the competitions apps/platforms. "Oh noes! Three mouse buttons! One mouse button! This simply will not do!"
Have gnu, will travel.
What I saw: Expert's Gay Sexual Interfaces Are a Step Backwards in Usability
Seriously? LoL
How much practice is required before you're considered an expert at these homo-erotic interfaces?
Is there skill quantization "tool", or perhaps a "Queer Eye" review?
Are the controller's or receptacles aesthetically pleasing?
Do lesbians with optional strap-ons have an advantage over the rest of us?
Are Expert heterosexual interfaces not equally as ridiculous?
I laughed for a good minute before I was disappointed by a second read of the headline...
Laptop touchpads are a prime example. I'm pretty use to the gestures on my Asus EEE. But my wife's Dell is very different. She can't use mine. I can barely use hers (i'm more willing to figure it out). And of course not all of the gestures work that well in the Linux. How do you even discover the gestures? They don't print a list of them in any easy to access place. So we use USB plugin mouse whenever possible.
Stupidity is its own reward.
"let's see, this one particular interface sucks because I have no clue how to use it..."
In the article they say:
In comments to Nielsen's article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes, a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but note that radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. 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.
I appreciate that they're important contributors to UI design, but their attitude is unrealistic to companies that are trying to ship products, make profit and gain market share. Companies spending too much time perfecting their UI design will go out of business while their competitors are shipping flawed but ultimately usable products.
I disagree. Using gestures (as long as they make sense, such as a back swipe to go back) make everything much easier, more efficient and are quite intuitive.
that are a step backward, it's the haphazard and sometimes overzealous implementation.
I don't imagine anyone today complains if their smartphone hides the zoom tool on a map. Everyone knows the zoom gesture and it's undeniably more convenient than using the tool. But before that had become a standard and everyone learned it it would be just plain foolish to hide those tools.
Done right gestures can be very helpful, convenient, even efficient.
... at least it'll get the fatties up off their chairs and MAKE them do a bit more aerobic exercise, so it's not all bad...
As a retired UI designer, the referenced article reads like sour grapes. The reasons for the "trouble" as posted (lack of established guidelines / misguided insistence by companies / developer community's ignorance) sounds like whining from a standards organization. Old farts always sound this way when someone younger and more bold come up with something new.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Much as I admire the work of Norman and Nielsen, I have to say that this report is 70% crap and 30% useful.
Discoverabilty is important, but with limited screen space is a challenge as yet unsolved.
Consistency would be great, but see below.
We're at the beginning of this technology, not the end. We can't expect it to stay in a usability lab until all the answers are known and agreed by competing suppliers. The world is the usabilty lab, and sales are the measure of usability. There is no mechanism to achieve agreement among competitors unless you want a 7 year standards committee process.
We are no longer in a world where our IT dept dictates what device we buy.
Some years ago I was blocked in traffic by an idiot and when he eventually moved, I mouthed "thank you" at him. He proceeded to follow me home, knocked on my door, and screamed at me that I had called him a "wanker". Well, I might have thought it...a universal gesture for "thank you" is surely needed.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'll be the judge of what UI interfaces are a step in whatever direction, since I'm the one using them. I really don't need some asshole with a pile of letters trailing behind his name to tell me if I'm having trouble using a UI or not. Got it figured out already buddy.
But I guess they have to try and justify their paycheck one way or another, and if telling people what they already know does the trick, more power to ya.
.. the behavior of the list interfaces (email app, etc.) is consistent throughout all lists, not between list view and item view.. i think this makes sense.. you have list, you know you can long-click on the item (on android).. it's like expecting that when right clicking in the windows explorer should have the same context menu as when you right click on the file in word.. or notepad . or .. whatever...
and..
ummm... touching brings up the context menu .. long pressing it brings up the keyboard - EVERYWHERE in android.. and.. if you haven't disabled it, you WILL get a feedback on your presses - on the nexus one (and probably most un-modified androids) clicking on the home button, menu button, etc. always leads to a vibration of the device.. this should be feedback enough .. if you keep holding the menu button after it vibrates, it will bring up the keyboard.. otherwise the context menu .. not that hard to grasp, and very consistent
If Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen created a UI it would probably be less productive, very basic and definitely not naturally intuitive. These guys think too scientifically about a UI. I'm not a big Apple fan, but the touch UI on the Iphone, Ipad is so intuitive for non techy users. I was actually amazed when all our managers requested Iphones over their Palm Phones and Blackberries. I thought it was all about the panache of having an Apple phone but it wasn't. The Iphone was that much more intuitive for them.
I sometimes think real engineer types have a hard time grasping that because they think too much like an engineer. I doubt Android would be what it is today if it were not for the influence of the Iphone UI. I think its good some companies take a lot of time to think about the usefulness of the UI instead of just sticking to the plain old standards.
First, when we start talking about usability, we should not write articles with a light yellow background with medium gray text. I love these usability guys, my favorite are the web ones, whose sites are often the worst to use and read. I digress...
We are pushing to a new interface design and let's be honest, it is going to take time. The second problem is one that did not exist when the web started. Patents. Let us imagine a world in which car manufacturers could patent how to use certain aspects of a car. I patent the steering wheel, someone else patents a gas pedal, someone else a brake pedal, etc. Imagine trying to drive. One car would be using left and right arrows to steer, another would only have use of a handbrake, another would have anolog toggles for gas, etc. The car industry would be a mess and the users would suffer.
Now come to mobile user interfaces. Oh right, Apple or Google or some troll patented a certain UI or certain gesture. So now a company either has to license that patent (if the other company allows it) or come up with their own idea. So intuitive gestures will never ever happen in this environment. The users ultimately suffer and no one cares. I expect individual applications to vary on UI and some to be poor. But the level of unintuitive is actually within the various operating systems, so some of the craptastic interfaces are because of the OS itself.
Now that this has been cleared up, I'm sure there'll be an announcement from Mozilla that Firefox 17 (due to be released in a few months - hey, gotta keep users on their toes with a major release every week) will get rid of mouse and keyboard navigation entirely in favor of gestures.
Hard to accept the arguments about poor usability when their own sites have clearly had little or no thought gone into the usability. Pot-kettle-black.
Although I am a former accessibility consultant, I wasn't in it long enough to really have an expert opinion on gestures and whether or not standards would help anything.
What I can tell you is that guys like Nielsen make their money by auditing everything under the sun against these standards. In my day it was 508 and W3C (which are still valid today, but more easily satisfied, I think).
Some of what we did was really useful stuff in terms of educating other developers about how people would access the web with screen readers and some really fairly easy techniques to accommodate them and other people with disabilities.
But a lot of what we did was 'take this federal grant money to audit this state or local community college's web site so that they won't be sued under the ADA.' Your tax dollars paying for us to go around to institutions that could barely afford web developers (as they operate on your tax dollars) and tell them that yes, their web site could definitely allow them to be sued under the ADA.
It's definitely a dilemma though. There's a pretty easy argument that says that educational institutions should make their entire application process accessible. But as the technical guy in the process, I found that most of what went on was non-technical people talking to other non-technical people about how great the standards were and patting themselves on the back. We did a lot of 'sorry, you're not accessible' but very little 'let us give you a seminar on how to be accessible.'
I never met Nielsen, but he would make the news in our corner of the world a lot by going after some company or institution, declaring them inaccessible, and then hope to make a wagon of cash by getting hired by said company. That's how the industry is set up, though, so really I can't criticize him for it -- he would (rightly) say that too many people were totally ignorant of accessibility and so would use his reputation to put the spotlight on it and sometimes profit along the way. I just wonder how much stuff like Section 508 actually advanced usability.
The article does have a few points. But I find their problem with the menu button and the long click on Android to be a bit of a stretch. "How is someone supposed to know what is there?" Come on, the right click of the mouse is the same. Sometimes the items in the right click pop-up menu change depending on what you clicked on, or what application you are in, or if you are viewing the list of emal, or have one opened.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
(1) Tooltips - no such thing as a "mouseover". No (built-in) way to show them.
(2) Scrollable regions (frames, divs with overflow:auto) - if you don't show scroll bars, the user has no way to know that there's more content in the region that they can scroll to. Not so bad if the edge of the region visibly truncates something. Then you know that there's some more content there. But what if the edge of the region occurs between 2 paragraphs?
I'm not saying that these problems can't be solved. I have my own (site-unique) mechanism for tooltips and am in the process of coming up with some (site-unique) CSS to clearly highlight scrollable regions. I'm just agreeing with the authors that it's a big step back not to have any automatic feedback at all about the existence of extra content.
I don't think this issue ever will, or can, go away. I'm old and remember when interactive interfaces (keyboard and video display) replaced batch processing. After some maturing of the new interface we adopted a soft standard of "give a prompt including clues to acceptable responses"; then accept and audit the reply on the same line. For example "Saving record, ok? [Y or N]"; and then the user would press the "Y" or "N" key. I had an application that had run without a hitch for a couple of years and then quit working. On investigation I found a new user was responding "O" for "ok".