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,
What with all the OS companies trademarking the various gestures, there's no way they'll become standardized. Unfortunately.
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.
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.
...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
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.
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?
So when TFA says, "We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers," you see that as what? Whining? A bad thing?
Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading figures in human-computer interaction. His whole point is that companies and developers don't need to make it all up on the fly, because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices. There are plenty of experts, not just Nielsen, who can offer their expertise. The problem is that so far it seems like it's being ignored.
Breakfast served all day!
Actually, with interfaces, everyone doing it the same way is better than a few of them doing it differently, even if those few are actually doing it in a way that is otherwise easier to use, because the point of an interface is for people to understand how to use it.
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.
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.
Your summary is incorrect. It should be "...since they don't apply the basic principles of usability, which have nothing to do with particular interface metaphors or technologies, they are making simpleminded mistakes."
It has nothing to do with abandoning the old desktop environment, and everything to do with giving poor feedback, providing arbitrary interfaces that don't provide cues to the user, not providing consistent behavior in similar situations, etc. These are problems that have more to do with understanding how users think and learn and applying that to the interface design.
... 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...
Funny - he doesn't like the decades old windowed desktop environment either. I have to be honest here, if you fault Donald Normans logic on something, you better have good reasons - he is a /very/ clear thinker indeed. Read "The Design of Everyday Things".
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
a universal gesture for "thank you" is surely needed.
How about a thumbs up?
which is totally what she said