Designing Gestural Interfaces

DESIGNING INTERACTIVE GESTURES: THE BASICS

The design of any product or service should start with the needs of those who will use it, tempered by the constraints of the environment, technology, resources, and organizational goals, such as business objectives. The needs of users can range from simple (I want to turn on a light) to very complex (I want to fall in love). (Most human experience lies between those two poles, I think.) However natural, interesting, amusing, novel, or innovative an interactive gesture is, if the users' needs aren't met, the design is a failure.

The first question that anyone designing a gestural interface should ask is: should this even be a gestural interface? Simply because we can now do interactive gestures doesn't mean they are appropriate for every situation. As Bill Buxton notes,^[14] when it comes to technology, everything is best for something and worse for something else, and interactive gestures are no exception.

There are several reasons to not have a gestural interface:

Heavy data input

Although some users adapt to touchscreen keyboards easily, a keyboard is decidedly faster for most people to use when they are entering text or numbers.

Reliance on the visual

Many gestural interfaces use visual feedback alone to indicate that an action has taken place (such as a button being pressed). In addition, most touchscreens and many gestural systems in general rely entirely on visual displays with little to no haptic affordances or feedback. There is often ...