Dan Saffer is preparing an O’Reilly title on interactive gestures. Let me compile some thoughts/ citations from the publicly available preview of Chapter 1 for our course:
- ”Tap is the new click.
- A gesture is any physical movement that can be sensed and responded to by a digital system without the aid of a traditional pointing device such as a mouse or stylus. A wave, a head nod, a touch, a toe tap, and even a raised eyebrow can be a gesture.
- Most gestural interfaces can be categorized as either touchscreen or freeform.
- The ease of use one experiences with a well-designed touchscreen comes from what University of Maryland professor Ben Shneiderman coined as direct manipulation in a seminal 1983 paper.* Direct manipulation is the ability to manipulate digital objects on a screen without the use of command-line commands.
- Touchscreens and gestural interfaces take direct manipulation to another level. Indirect manipulations are possible with gestural interfaces as well.
- The difference between gestural interfaces and traditional interfaces is simply this: gestural interfaces have a much wider range of actions possible to manipulate a system. In addition to being able to type, scroll, point-and-click, and all the other standard interactions available to desktop systems, gestural interfaces can take advantage of the whole body for triggering system behaviors.
- The design of any product or service should start with the needs of those who will use it, tempered by the constraints of the environment, technology, resources, and organizational goals, such as business objectives.
- The first question that anyone designing a gestural interface should ask is: should this even be a gestural interface? The fact that we can now do interactive gestures doesn’t mean they are appropriate for every situation.
- Gestural interfaces are particularly good for: More natural interactions, less cumbersome or visible hardware, more flexibility, more nuance, more fun.
- Once a designer has decided to include a gestural interface, the next question is just what kind of gestural interface will it be: direct, indirect, or a hybrid?”
* Direct manipulation: a step beyond programming languages, IEEE Computer 16(8), August 1983, 57–69.
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