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Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability

Posted by samzenpus on from the wave-to-the-past dept.

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."

16 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. This is giving me ideas... by grub · · Score: 4, Funny


    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,
    1. Re:This is giving me ideas... by hjf · · Score: 3, Informative

      You forgot the roadblock with the "Under Construction" sign.

    2. Re:This is giving me ideas... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't blink! Blink and you're dead. This control is fast,faster than you can imagine. Good luck.

  2. patents by danbuter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What with all the OS companies trademarking the various gestures, there's no way they'll become standardized. Unfortunately.

    1. Re:patents by AndyAndyAndyAndy · · Score: 5, Funny

      There's actually a particular gesture that's widely standardized to address this type of thing. At least in the US.

      --
      It's always confirmation bias!
  3. It has been a generation since 1994. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by jon_doh2.0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "It has been roughly one full generation of developers since 1994"

      Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.

    2. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Marketing types would like us all to believe generations can be packaged up and tagged as "boomers", "GenY", ect, which then take on certain attributes that sales people can target. Back in the "real world" there is no syncronised changing of the guard, what we have is a shared continuum of ideas and experience that is not bounded by time, place, DOB, or target markets. It is only bounded by how far nature can go in evolving our talent for using complex language and in evolutionary terms she has only just started experimenting.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    3. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by marqs · · Score: 4, Funny

      Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.

      Why do you tell me this now?
      Does this mean that my initiation rite was all bogus?
      Is the tribal tattoo made with the old IBM dot matrix printer and the piercings made with the hole card puncher just a way to make fun of me?

    4. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by MrBandersnatch · · Score: 3, Insightful

      younger programmers, or programmers in India/China/Shanghai etc.

      And there's the key to this entire mess. Never leave UI design to programmers. They are fundamentally different jobs requiring different skill-sets and methodologies. Now if you will excuse me, I need to see how well my landscape designer is doing with the gardening,

  4. Best interface ever developed was... by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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
  5. I've got a gesture by DigitalSorceress · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:I've got a gesture by lowlymarine · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't see how anyone who is familiar with computers could find iOS's gestures "intuitive." I actually had to look up how to create folders after iOS 4.0 hit. Drag one application on top of another? How does that bear any resemblance to a) how things are already done on Windows/OS X/Gnome/KDE/etc. or b) common sense?

      In Android, conversely, you long-press (stand-in for right-click) and bam, "New folder" is right there in the menu that comes up. Just like you're already used to.

    2. Re:I've got a gesture by Missing.Matter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In Windows Vista and 7 at least there is a visual indicator for a long press that aids in discoverability. When you touch the screen, a progress bar starts circling your finger. I've found people discover the long press on their own, since they wait to see what happens when the circle completes. It's hard to describe, so here's a link showing it. In the video the delay between when the screen is touched and when the progress bar stars is a little longer than the default.

  6. Re:YES!!! This is why the android bugs me so much! by cduffy · · Score: 3, Informative

    People who suggest Task Killer don't know how Android works.

    Android applications do not run in the background unless they go out of their way to do so. When they *do* go out of their way to do so, they can be killed at any time by the operating system. This design makes tools such as "Advanced Task Killer" not only unnecessary, but counterproductive; read the link above for a detailed description of why auto-killing background tasks actually makes Android *slower*.

  7. Tradition & Intuition by buckhead_buddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.