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Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren't aware of them.
Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy, says that touch interaction should revolutionize your approach to interface design. In his virtual seminar, Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch, Josh offers techniques to make gestures more discoverable without overloading users, and experiences, with endless instruction. We ran out of time for all of the audience's questions during the seminar, so Josh joins Adam Churchill to tackle those remaining questions.
Here's an excerpt from the podcast.
"…buttons are an abstraction and I don't mean that just in the virtual world, I also mean that in the real world. If you look at the history of the button, which is really only about 100 years old with the introduction of electricity, even then buttons were a hack, a workaround.
If you think about a light switch, putting a switch over here to turn on a light over there is not particularly intuitive, right? It's a workaround because it's really inconvenient to walk into a dark room with a ladder and climb up to the light bulb to turn the thing on. We've used buttons, at times, when we didn't have the luxury of direct interaction. We had to insert this middle man…"
Tune in to the podcast to hear Josh answer these questions:
As always we want to know what you're thinking. Share your thoughts in our comments section.
Recorded: January, 2012
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Full Transcript.
Adam Churchill: Welcome everyone the SpoolCast. Josh Clark recently joined us for a virtual seminar titled "Button Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch". This seminar on mobile design spoke to the massive evolution in technology that is becoming increasingly tactile. Josh is joining me today to get to some of the questions that we didn't get to address in the seminar.
Now, if you didn't get to listen to the particular seminar, like all of our virtual seminars you can get access to the recordings in our UIE user experience training library. It's presently over 85 recorded seminars from wonderful topic experts just like Josh Clark that will give you the tips and techniques that you need to create great design.
Hey, Josh, welcome back.
Josh Clark: So happy to be here.
Adam: Josh, for the people that weren't with us for your seminar last week can you just give us an overview?
Josh: Sure, yeah. I was basically talking about touch screen design and the way that touch interfaces require really new thinking about the way that we as designers think about creating our interfaces. For that matter, we as users, the impact that it has on us sometimes in very subtle ways about accessing information in this really direct interaction rather than with this illusion of unmediated interaction with content instead of what we're used to, which is the desktop GUI that we've been using for 30 years with buttons and tabs and menus and so forth.
I guess a broad point that I was trying to make at the outset of the seminar was that direct interaction with content of tapping and stretching and pulling and dragging content and really using content as the interface instead of buttons and controls is really going to revolutionize or should revolutionize the way that we design our interfaces.
And so the title of the talk, "Buttons Are a Hack" is really talking about how buttons are an abstraction and I don't mean that just in the virtual world, I also mean that in the real world. If you look at the history of the button, which is really only about 100 years old with the introduction of electricity, even then buttons were a hack, a workaround.
If you think about a light switch, putting a switch over here to turn on a light over there is not particularly intuitive, right? I mean it's something that is a workaround because it's really inconvenient to walk into a dark room with a ladder and climb up to the light bulb to turn the thing on. We've used buttons, at times, when we didn't have the luxury of direct interaction that we had to insert this middle man. So it's a workaround, a hack.
An inspired hack and a necessary one in many cases. We've used that same approach in our interface design and I think with touch where we can create, again, this illusion of manipulating content directly or using content as the control and information as the interface rather than this middle man of buttons and switches that it actually helps us cut through complexity for our users.
The trick is as we explore all the possibilities of gestures, particularly these abstract gestures, multifinger gestures, three finger swipes, things that don't have, maybe, a corollary in the real world, we have this real challenge, both as designers and users, of how to teach those gestures. And that's really what the meat of the seminar was about. What are the techniques that you can use to make these gestures easy to discover without burdening people with lots of instruction?
Adam: Well great. Let's get back to some of the many questions that our audience fed us that day. Tim had a question about web applications on touch devices. How do you transport hover interactions from desktop to touch?
Josh: Yeah, you know, it's something that is a question that I get a lot because obviously there is no hover on a touch screen. If you're going to interact with something you literally do have to touch it. I guess I would back up first and say is hover a great idea anyway? I think there are other folks that have a talked about this at length, I know Luke Wroblewski has a very pointed perspective on this, which is that hover is kind of a crummy idea to use in interface anyway because it confuses proximity with intent.