Suddenly I’m Surrounded by Touch Screens!
Everywhere I turn I’m suddenly surrounded by touch screens. Sure, the technology has been around for years, but up until recently I hadn’t seen the public embrace it. It’s time for all of us to stop focusing solely on computers with keyboards and handhelds with keypads and start thinking about how our customers can use touch pads.
Everyone is Upgrading to Tappable Handheld Devices
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When I glance around to see what mobile devices people are carrying, I can’t help but think the first iPhone made a relatively small splash in the market compared to the latest model. Last year, just cool designer types had them. Now many of the developers I work with carry them. That’s quite a demographic shift. And it’s not just hip Apple folks. You can’t watch a tv show these days without seeing (or at least fast forwarding your DVR though) commercials for touch screen phones like Sprint’s Instinct or Verizon’s LG Dare. Now people who didn’t want to switch to AT&T with the iPhone can easily swap devices and join the new finger-tapping crowd. |
UX Community is Buzzing About Touch
Yesterday I was looking through slide decks from the recent UX (User Experience) Week in San Francsico, and I noticed an interesting trend. Several presentations focused around touch screens:
- Designing Natural Interfaces: Creating Multi-Touch, Multi-User Interactions
- Tap is the New Click
Even My After-Dinner Wine Bar Had Touch!
Last week after seeing The Dark Knight on IMAX, a few friends and I wanted to enjoy the gorgeous city night before heading home, so we wandered into a new wine bar called Clo in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle shopping center. In the center was a long table that was actually a huge touch screen. You virtually thumb through their catalog to pick what you want. The interface allowed you to browse by color, type, taste, etc.
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Information Overload: Are You Up for the Interface Challenge?
Many of us are still clamoring on the Web 2.0 bandwagon while other interaction designers are plowing ahead to tackle new ways to share and interact with data. Sure, wikis and folksonomies are awesome, but information challenges are piling up, and a designer’s work is never done. In fact, that’s what makes our line of work so darn interesting—not to mention valuable to companies.
A while back after attending the Future of Web Design conference, I blogged about what Web 3.0 might look like. While my speculations were high level, a recent article entitled User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload in Read Write Web showcases information challenges that are starting to rear their ugly yet beautiful heads.
Each scenario in the post includes a description of the interface, a hint at new information challenges, and a clip from YouTube to show off the technology. Below are examples of the types of interfaces and new design challenges that are ahead.
Giant touch screens
Touch screens assume, well, touch. So how do users interact when items are out of reach?
Desktops that mimic the ordered chaos of a physical desktop
If we’re mimicking physical space, a pile of documents should get displaced or should react as another document collides with it. How do we allow users to create both tidy and untidy piles?
Thought-controlled menus
A thought-controlled interface might be hard to imagine, though we already have thought-controlled artificial limbs that react solely to nerves controlled by your brain, so why not an interface?
3-D gaming
The article shows the impact moving from 2-D to 3-D can have on even the simplest gaming interfaces.
Very cool stuff. Check out the full article: User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload
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