The iPad, Gestures, and Community
February 18th, 2010
Quick Catch-Up
You probably know this, but just in case you are out of the loop, I’ll give some quick background.
Apple’s trackpads – obviously including the iPad – can support up to eleven distinct touchpoints per touch sequence. In other words, you can use both hands and…your nose? On the iPhone, and mostly on the laptops, we use one or two touches most of the time.
On top of the number of touchpoints, multitouch development uses a concept of “touch sequences” to track a discrete series of touches over a short period of time. In English, that means you can put ALL ELEVEN FINGERS on an Apple touch screen, twist, twirl, and swipe, and apps can respond accordingly.
This is fairly new to personal computing. We’re used to a keyboard, a mouse, occasionally a trackball or trackpad. We point, we click, and we drag.
Now we can do more. Much, much more. Obvious, yes? Yes.
Today
We’ve all seen touch-and-drag. We’ve seen flicking through a collection, or flicking to activate supplemental controls on a cell. We’ve seen pinch-to-zoom and reverse-pinch-to-zoom-out. We saw these on the most well-funded educational video series ever: Apple’s own iPhone TV commercials.
Apps mostly stick to the meaning of those gestures, and users benefit from that fact. Collectively, we developers and designers have self-regulated in a fairly organic, reactionary way. But with the larger screen on the iPad, can we unify sooner? Preemptively?
Just wait until people begin using the iPad. Think about that form factor, about the usage contexts. It wouldn’t shock me if a QWERTY keyboard disappeared from the device in a couple of years, replaced by something brand new…something one-handed and elegant. If so, the new *thing* should be leveraged across apps to the benefit of everyone. Novel gestures are a fleeting competitive advantage.
Why Collaborate?
In the sort of wild west that popped up around the iPhone – and will likely pop up around the iPad – the earliest adopters gained footing and market share (by virtue of a smaller market) while users floundered in a Stockholm Syndrome situation. Consumers were captive to the limited array of apps that existed in the early days and were willing to invest time learning how each app worked. A lot of folks are still quite flexible, but I wonder how long it can last.
The tipping point between critical mass of users and critical mass of apps happens quickly, though, and we product designers have to make sure it tips the right way. That is, in favor of users. And reciprocally, in favor of product developers. We can do that by lowering the learning curve for each new app that pops into the store.
A Warm and Comfy Blanket Statement
It’s a mistake to hijack established gestures, just as it would be a mistake for every computer to have a different keyboard layout.
I wrote about this in my book on iPhone UX hacking, and still abide by it.
We owe it to users to collectively invest the same meaning in each new gesture we invent/acknowledge, unless there’s a great reason to change established gestures. If that’s the case, we should register the change with other product devs/designers and move everyone else in the right direction.
We should also focus on bringing new gestures to market in a way that prevents confusion. It would be great to share feedback from our users on input gestures. I can even imagine a choreographed A/B test among competing apps. (KUMBAYA!)
Right now, though, there’s no easy way to share. No grand central dispatch. No forum.
We can read the iPhone and iPod Human Interface Guidelines, copy the earliest players, and bank too much on “common sense” (a problematic concept if ever there were one).
Instead, maybe we should talk about this. Contribute. Debate. Share code. Share artwork. Share labels. Share translations.
The Gist – CommonUX
To get to the point, I want product designers to collaborate and focus competition on features that don’t alienate users. I want us all to share our concepts for gestural input, share the iconography that represents actions (and more), and focus our innovation on the features that matter. Let’s assist users by assisting each other, reduce barriers, and make for a great platform where product designers can spend time where it pays off.
I’ve created a GitHub site and have purchased a domain that could – if folks choose to participate – act as a central repo for collaborating on common user experience elements. This post is to get the word out and figure out whether folks care.
Elements we can standardize include:
- Gestures for common actions
- Apple-friendly icons representing common concepts or objects
- Code and icons for both Cocoa and Android (and…?) for handling common gestures
- Colloquial names for gestures
So, welcome to CommonUX. Let’s sort it all out.
