2010. The year of touch.
If Minority Report's gestural UI made you salivate at the prospects of future computer interaction, start saving up for a toy that earned bragging rights to call itself revolutionary months ahead of its launch.
Excitement has reached its peak with the recent line-up of rumors on the upcoming tablet / ebook reader by Apple. Other guerilla fighters of the newspaper revolution don't sit idle either. Though facts are scarce and speculation fuel itself, one thing seems pretty clear by now. New tablet devices will sport touch user interfaces for scrolling, zooming, manipulating content & apps as well as typing.
So what's special about that you might ask. We've had iphones and other mobile handsets with touch screens for a while now. Occasionally we use touch technology in ATMs or KIOSKS at tradeshows or shopping malls.
Should Apple tablet project come into fruition, it would be the first mainstream consumer product aimed at work and entertainment use, allowing multi-finger gestures to operate a flat-panel device held in both hands. Now. This is special and new.
Provided the price is right and consumers fall in love with a new gizmo like they did with flashy iphones, Apple tablet will revolutionize the world of UX like nothing before. Soon enough computer manufacturers will follow suit and flood the market with better or worse tablets / ebook readers featuring touch interfaces. Tactile UIs will step off the geek scene and claim livingrooms of the Joneses.
We're about to take part in a major shift of archetypes. If what we associated with "computers" pre-2010 was a set containing a monitor, a box, keyboard and a mouse, it won't be the same ever after. 2010 and beyond, you will be able to comfortably work, play, study, read, email, or socialize online without having to touch your keyboard or mouse. You will just tap on your screen directly. If I had a go at predicting the future, I'd say 5 years from now, majority of short emails, IMs, facebook wall entries, twitter posts, blog post replies and other sub-50 text forms will be authored directly on screens, not keyboards, as is the case today.
All that excitement aside, we UX aficionados stand against a big pile of challenges & opportunities when it comes to the snowball popularity of touch UIs.
Challenges:
- Lack of standards in tactile UI. Take scrolling for example. Because of patent protection, big egos and sheer creativity, each manufacturer would devise their own gestures for scrolling a website. There is a need for setting up a consortium that would endevour to standardize tactile interfaces or at least promote best practices among software makers.
- Custom elements. Ever tried to fill out a form on the iphone? Yeah. I don't think it will be that much different on the tablet. Hence the need for custom form elements (ie. pull downs, check boxes), bigger and with greater interaction area.
- Less affordance. Due to smaller displays as well as larger & less precise pointing device (finger), we'll have to start getting rid of things from our apps / websites. Not wanting to remove functionalites entirely, we'd need to hide them in order to unclutter the view. Decreasing the so called affordance, (decreasing the number of interaction possibilities that the user is aware of) will in effect tilt the UI learning curve even further.
- Typing. Will tablets and touch interfaces change the way we enter text into machines? Is touch version of a standard qwerty keyboard a way to go or should we rather explore new possibilities for inputting text.
- New browser / OS capabilities. Because of the above, browsers will require new features allowing to zoom on the specific area, like the block of text, group of tiny links or buttons positioned close to each other.
"... the buttons of a control box may be smaller than a users finger and located close together. Therefore it may be difficult for the user to make a selection directly without possibly pressing an undesirable button. To solve this problem, at least a portion of the control box would be enlarged, including the buttons therein when the user places their thumb over the control box. Once the control box has reached its enlarged state, the user can then accurately select one of the enlarged buttons. The control box would then reduce to its initial size after the button is selected or after a predetermined time period in which no selection was made or when the user moves their finger away from the control box"
Opportunities:
- Augmented reality. If future generations of tablets get equipped with video cameras, amazing AR opportunities could be realized.
- Greater consumption of content. Most people read blogs or online news at work or when they're at their regular computers. Tablets will put the end to that and extend possibilities of interacting with online content.
- Increased usage by kids. Part of a reason why kids start with computers quite late (around the age of 3-4) is that they need understand and feel the relationship between the mouse sitting on the desk (or a touch pad) and a screen in front of them. Being more intuitive and WYTIWYG (what you touch is what you get) tablets will remove that need and decrease the entry age below 2 yo.
- Spatial controls. Thanks to built-in a
ccelerometers and similar widgets
, users will be able to operate some functions of the device / application / website by applying a motion to the device. Shake to reload?Looking at the UX playing field, I think I need to acquaint myslef with a touch UI skill-set ASAP. I'm seting about to design some touch UIs in 2010. One of my new year resolution is getting my hands dirty with iphone / tablet apps and designing an app I could finally touch :)
5 comments
Jan 02, 2010
Silke said...
I agree. I can't wait for the introduction of more devices with touch screens. I was surprised at how effortlessly I could even write large texts on my iPhone although some stiffness sets in when I tap for too long with my index finger.As for children learning to use computers via touch screen, this is exactly my observation. My almost three-year-old can use my iPhone as easily as I do.
I think safari already offers a couple of customized functionalities for touch screens - it is the website creators who will have to follow suit. I am currently working on a new website and I am tempted at creating a safari version as well which would allow users a quick access to the website's database. The css looks easy enough, even for a lay website host like me.
As a linguist I am also interested to see whether in future we will remain with the qwerty system which was initially developed for ten finger typing or if we will be coming up with a new system such as abcde. My guess is yes, given that people in the past got used to mobile phone alphanumeric entry systems for texting very quickly.
Blog entry read and comment written on my iPhone
Jan 02, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
Hey Silke. That's a lengthy reply considering a tiny keyboard you used to type it. On point of keyboard systems, or text entry in general, I also think this area is a bit dusted and needs some innovation. Check out the link from above, that setup looks promising.
Jan 03, 2010
kevinn said...
In terms of touchscreens, all i ask is for all makers (mobile phones, tablets and others) use capacitative/PCT based screens, just like the iPhone. I love its feel, accuracy and responsiveness.OTOH, why navigate with appendages... http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/04/01/ :P
Jan 03, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
hey, btw, I always wondered, this opera face gestures thingy is a big joke right?
Jan 26, 2010
Michael Saganowski said...
More on touch revolution by Michael Arrington from TechCrunchhttp://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/26/ipad-touch-sensitive-case/
