from the there's-only-one-gesture-that's-needed dept.
The growing reach of gesture-based user interfaces:
User interface (UI) design is currently experiencing a transition from traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to systems designed to recognize a person's gestures and movements.
Hence, in this blog, we will discuss the possible implications of this groundbreaking transition in terms of user experience (UX) and the accessibility of modern interfaces. Likewise, we'll explore how developers adapt to the technological shift to deliver innovative solutions while outlining the challenges of adopting gesture-based interactions.
Gesture-based interactions are quickly becoming a standard and the technology is widely considered the future of UI. Therefore, modern devices and applications must adapt to meet the needs of their users. On top of that, recent data shows that 82% of users prefer apps with gesture-based controls.
The algorithms built into touch screen devices, such as smartphones recognize a range of touch types, from scrolling to swiping. Because of this technology, users are now able to navigate applications with simple gestures like pinches or taps. A classic example of this is the navigation controls of Google Maps which require the user to pinch the screen to zoom in or out, and swipe/drag to move to a different location.
[...] Enhancing user engagement is one of the key benefits of gesture-based interactions, allowing users to directly manipulate screen elements to quickly reach their goal. The direct nature of using gestures can create a better sense of connection when using an application, not only boosting user satisfaction but also increasing loyalty, ensuring the app has longevity.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2024, @10:20PM (4 children)
..on my desktop. Reaching out to the screen would get old pretty fast.
(Score: 4, Touché) by looorg on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:11PM (1 child)
I would be very annoyed if I had to touch my desktop/laptop screens. I hate people poking screens to point at things. Even for smartphone screens. The onlt exception is the onscreenkeyboard. But beyond that I prefer actual buttons. The zoom image/map example, how is it just not easier to have a few small buttons to zoom in/out, even if they are onscreen.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:35AM
I love my 26" touchscreen monitor connected to my NUC desktop.... for drawing stick figure illustrations. As a navigation interface it is dismal, I use the mouse and keyboard for all menu and control manipulations.
Our commercial product has a touch screen interface, but thankfully only requires about a dozen touches per hour to navigate the various normally used functions. We augmented it with three knobs for those things that people actually care about controlling quickly and easily. Very few users will pull up the on-touchscreen keyboard for a text heavy workflow, they'll usually opt to add a keyboard if they use those features. Our test team plugs in a mouse most of the time because they hate the vagueness of the touch interface.
As for OP - gestures mostly suck. Swipe this, flick that, pinch and drag... are we going to stroke it up and down, or round and round in circles? Pinch and unpinch to zoom, pull back is the only thing that I feel is done better with a screen than a traditional mouse with a wheel. Kinda like the stick figure illustrations... limited use cases, but there are a very few things that a touch interface does as well, let alone better, than a mouse.
Then we can start to talk about how you can get really good quality mice, but large capacitive touch screen monitors are mostly vague - unless you start using a pressure sensitive stylus on a Wacom style monitor, and I don't think that's the kind of UI OP is alluding to.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:32PM
I have a gesture for these idiots right here :P
Touch screens on desktops have been known to suck balls for a very long time. Look up the 1983 HP 150 computer. Nice little green screen and runs an adaption of Windows 1.0. It has a touch screen. Nobody wanted that. It was dumb.
A long time ago, I used to know a graphics designer that would have punched someone out if they got their greasy finger prints on her monitor.
But now that everything has been dumbed down in to little toy cell phones, every idiot thinks everything should work like their cell phone.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Reziac on Thursday July 18 2024, @02:31AM
I have near-blind friends who would have to give up using the computer entirely. Screen readers don't do gestures.
And I just got a complaint from my tablet-using friend about how a mis-aimed gesture undid hours of work, because it accidentally triggered an "UNDO ALL" function (and "REDO ALL" doesn't exist).
Personally I hate the damn things, including the pinch/pull crap. As you say, it gets old really fast, and is untenable on a desktop. I have my desk set up to keep my shoulders relaxed, not sore from constantly reaching for the screen.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Barenflimski on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:12PM (11 children)
Back in the day when I used to code stuff, we used to make the interface as easy to use as possible.
Few changes, only 'upgrades'. No switching functions to different menus. If you wanted to quit, we had a big red button for you.
Today its obfuscation based on psychological feedback to make sure your kid needs something before you ever complete a form to ask to leave the site.
"Enhancing User Engagement" is an absolutely terrible term which could mean anything. IMO, its not about making anything easier for me in most of the crap served up to me anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:49PM (7 children)
It's even simpler. The reason why the interface on nearly every website I use gets completely re-designed and more difficult to use every 6 months is because....there are a bunch of UI/UX designers out there who can't wait to design the next "cool" interface so they can jerk off to it. They feel the need to justify their paycheck and very existence by constantly changing stuff that worked just fine only to make it annoying to use...so that people complain....so that they get to re-design it again and make it even worse.
Take a look at craigslist. Do they need a team of $150k/year UI/UX designers complete with a convoluted build and deploy process to deliver a useful (to some people) website? No.
The world would be a much better place if there were a lot more unemployed UI/UX people.
Just don't take it too far. Not ever website needs to be as raw as craigslist.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:40AM (6 children)
>.there are a bunch of UI/UX designers out there who can't wait to design the next "cool" interface so they can jerk off to it.
There is certainly a lot of that, but I think in the inner circles of evil (Facebook springs to mind) they have intentional delays and buried content to get the stuff they make their money on in front of your eyeballs while you try to access the stuff you're really after.
It's the same crap as K-Mart, WalMart, Target et al where you come in for something simple, but the whole world of crap gets paraded in front of you before you can get out of the store with what you came for.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Thursday July 18 2024, @02:34AM (2 children)
Totally agree. And it's why any time I see a feedback function on such a site, they get an earful (well, screenful) of complaints about how I couldn't find what I fucking came to get, because they made it not worth the aggravation.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @01:10PM (1 child)
>complaints about how I couldn't find what I fucking came to get
I believe they tune their algorithms to get a certain number of those complaints - if they're not pissing some people off badly enough to complain, they're not optimizing their exposure.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday July 18 2024, @04:39PM
I totally agree. Sometimes it's even obvious all complaints are merely logged for volume, then routed to dev/null.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2024, @09:52AM (2 children)
The delays are there because delays are better for "normal" people:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-will-ruin-apps-for-you [fastcompany.com]
https://danariely.com/locksmiths/ [danariely.com]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007818 [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by EEMac on Thursday July 18 2024, @10:25AM
Is this why Windows 11 is so slow? They want people to trust it?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @01:20PM
I'm sure most of us have encountered the websites (for me it's usually "phone number lookup") where the site teases you along with delay after delay after delay dripping little promises, teasers of things you want to hear... just wait a little longer... then there are the long drawn out stories that do the same, blathering on and on with low quality storytelling on the tease that they might eventually say something of interest - usually started off with something like a bikini photo...
It's almost as bad as the evening news used to be (probably still is, I haven't watched in 25+ years): "massive explosion in downtown office building, film at 11" - do we tell which office building? which downtown? casualty count? No, for that you need to tune in at 11, but meanwhile, here's a stock photo of a massive explosion (not the one we're going to maybe tell you about in 2 hours).
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:37AM (1 child)
User experience on "free" websites is an entirely different thing than User experience on actual productivity focused software, whether that's an application or web based.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday July 18 2024, @06:14AM
Preach my man. 100%.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:40AM
To me it means the UI is making users waste more time with the frigging UI than getting the job done.
That's why Windows 11 (and 10 etc) are shittier than Windows 7 in many cases. More steps to do stuff. Windows 11 broke right click[1] among many other things.
Yes the MacOS people love those extra gestures as excuses/opportunities to caress their MacBooks that they overpaid for. But many of us in the Enterprise world on our "lowest quote" company issued hardware would prefer if the OS UI stops getting in the way so we can get our jobs done faster. Unlike many Desktop Linux fanbois[2], our priority is using the apps not the OS.
[1] Yes you can edit the registry but fact is their change didn't make stuff easier nor faster. Now if they left the old behavior and allowed power users (or a Group Policy) to move unwanted stuff to the "More Options" section so that their wanted stuff would load faster, then I'd say that's an improvement. In some scenarios there can be very many right click options, but a real solution is something like my suggestion, not moving nearly everything to a More Options menu where the stuff is now an additional click away and likely takes about as long to load if not longer.
[2] Linux fanbois love changing their distros whether tweaking their current distro or changing to another one. Not all Linux users are the fanbois I'm talking about. The fanbois are the ones evangelizing about their distro, whereas others spend more time (talking/using) on the apps (e.g. getting stuff up on ProxMox, setting up HAProxy).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dwilson98052 on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:29PM (9 children)
...and less is more.
And no, I'm not talking about the commands 'less' and 'more' though oddly enough the same applies there too, but for the opposite reason.
The more features they seem to add to touchscreen UIs the less useful they seem to get. So many features are poorly implemented and sketchy at best, and many others are so obscure that few people will ever hear about them let alone use them.
With a few exceptions, touchscreen UI peaked at least a decade ago IMO.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:43AM (8 children)
Android has pulled some crap where they want to get rid of the three navigation icons at the bottom of the screen and replace them with gestures.
I opted out within about 5 minutes of trying to use the gestures. I especially don't want a future where I've trained to the v14 gestures only to have them "improved" in v15, "refined" in v16, "enhanced" in v17, and "reimagined" in v18, all invisibly with no indication of which generation of gestures you are interacting with until stuff starts acting weird. Give me my damn: triangle, square, circle forever, thank you very much.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:57AM (5 children)
> ... triangle, square, circle ...
Oddly enough, those were the knob shapes on some of the critical controls for the WWII submarine I toured in Hawaii. When running silent/deep, the sub would turn off all the lights to save power and the controls were worked by feel, with the shape of the knobs to distinguish between them.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Thursday July 18 2024, @02:36AM (4 children)
Now, imagine using a darkened touchscreen in the dark....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Thursday July 18 2024, @02:58AM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday July 18 2024, @03:47AM (1 child)
I see you've encountered our new "Everyday Realism" user interface!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2024, @11:09AM
> our new "Everyday Realism"
--> our new "Everyday Realism with Haptic Enhancements" ??
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @01:12PM
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Thursday July 18 2024, @05:32AM (1 child)
Icons? I want my buttons back! I'm tired of having to swipe in from the edge of the screen five times to get the icons when watching a video.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 18 2024, @02:03PM
I will say, while I liked the buttons on the Palm Pilots - the capacitive touch screen seems overall more reliable / durable than those buttons ever were.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Thursday July 18 2024, @06:28AM
I remember a game back in the day from Bungie (pre-Halo) called Myth: The Fallen Lords. It had a really interesting mouse gesture command which would change the direction that your troops were facing. Select a bunch of troops, then briefly click while dragging the mouse in the direction you want the troops to face. It took a few tries to get it, but quickly became easy. This allowed for rapid fine control of troops in battle - select (left click), move location (right click), change direction (gesture click) and whatever the middle-mouse button did.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday July 18 2024, @10:30AM
I will never, ever accept a fully gesture based system for daily use. If I have to I will code my own UI to avoid using this or probably if everything gets too awful switch to just using old computers forever. Seriously. Fuck this.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Thursday July 18 2024, @08:35PM
I think I'd like to see things that are now presented in menu form to open with a spread-pinch, like zooming in on an image. This way the choices could be spread out and organized visually rather than being right above and below one another. To me it's using the same metaphor... open this to see more. And we already have apps that use the method, like Fusion.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday July 19 2024, @09:49PM
More like de-evolution.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron