Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Recognizing Gestures

When you observe people using a device with a touch screen, sooner or later you will see them repeatedly fail at one of the simplest gestures: swiping. Swiping is used in many applications—most prominently in book readers to move from one page of the book to the next. If it is so simple and used consistently across applications, why do people often fail at executing the gesture properly?

One reason is that different applications implement the gesture slightly differently; the exact same swipe gesture may be recognized in one application but not in another. As a result, people may get used to swiping in one application but then get confused when the same gesture doesn’t work in another.

A more important reason is that there ...