What if I said that every single smartphone company has the wrong idea of the ideal user experience? Touch is the prime user interaction technology adopted by the manufacturers who make smartphones, GPS devices, music systems, even the self-checkout system at the library. I beg to question, why?
How many mechanical sets of actions can your limbs, including your hands, perform? I mean, everything from opening a bottle of water (systematic pressure and turn) to turning pages of a book (simply holding the pages gives you an idea whether you have one or two pages in hand). All of these actions are possible with high-density nerve points that your hands have. When you hold a bottle of water and tilt it, the water gushing through the bottle gives you a gauge of when you need to put your mouth underneath it. These are brilliant dialogues that things around us have with us which we are too carefree to notice.
But while interacting with our devices, it is hip to say, “At the touch of your fingers…” It seems a bit of a waste for the millions of nerve cells in our hands to only touch with them.
In your daily life, how many actions do you perform that involve touch? I personally use it only to check whether paint is wet or not. Yet, state-of-the-art devices that use touch technology are being called “intuitive.”
Bret Victor, a former designer at Apple, wrote “A Brief Rant on Future of Interaction Design”. In the viral article, he proposed ideas against touch technology that were lauded by the Internet community. His idea of interacting with devices is to make them intuitive for humans.
It is the job of the machines to learn what the human wants to do and not the other way around. Devices must be intuitive enough that humans do not have to spend time trying to figure out how they work. Only devices that succeed in this are worthy of the title “intuitive.”
A lot of current user interface designs now work with motion. Motion is a better expression by humans than touch. Movement is an active representation of the choices made by a human brain. The Microsoft Kinect is currently the most mature commercialized motion-sensing technology.
Let’s put it this way: If you are an artist, would you prefer to paint on a canvas or use the paint app on your smartphone? Every single stroke of the brush on the canvas is a dialogue with the painter. The amount of pressure applied on the stroke, every bristle of the brush that touches the canvas, gives the painter invaluable feedback. Compare this to the feedback presented by the app on the smartphone.
Alternatives to touch technology are being researched. Tangible user interface is a field of research taken up at MIT.
User interface design is as much a hardware problem as it is software. Unless we build better hardware platforms, we cannot build better software platforms that can interact with humans.
This is a prime reason why I believe machines are far from taking over the world — they wouldn’t know how to open a jar of pickles.