Gestural interfaces. Tablet usage is exploding. One study estimates that “90 million americans will use a tablet device in 2014″[1]. With this statistic, understanding how to design tablet interfaces is more important than ever. New research reports that users use tablet interfaces differently from desktop ones.
Gestural interfaces. The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers. Tables, counters and whiteboards will eventually become displays.
Gestural interfaces. In my second video for Intel Software Partners on re-imagining desktop application design, I take a deeper dive into designing touch-based interactions. That is, how large we need to make our application controls and where should we place them on screen in order to optimize for touch.
Gestural interfaces. In the beginning there was Clear - the iPhone app that turns managing your to-do list into a game of gesturing around the screen (if you haven’t seen how this works, you can watch a demo video of the app). At first I thought this was a folly that was quickly going to fade away. But a few weeks later somebody decided to redesign another basic app, your humble calculator, to also use gestures.
Gestural interfaces. The accelerometer embedded in our smart devices is typically used to align the screen depending on the orientation of the device, i. e. when switching between portrait and landscape modes. This capability provides great opportunities to create better user experiences because it offers an additional layout with a simple turn of a device, and without pressing any buttons.
Gestural interfaces. I just kicked off a new video series for Intel Software Partners on re-imaging desktop application design. Many of the capabilities (touch, location detection, sensors) that got me excited and focused on mobile over the past several years are now making their way to new devices and creating different ways of thinking about and designing desktop software.
Gestural interfaces. It's not surprising that Apple's iPad is a popular computing device. But the numbers behind its growth are sure to raise a few eyebrows. In 2 years, Apple sold 67 million iPads. It took the company 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years for that many iPods, and over 3 years for that many iPhones.
Gestural interfaces. Brian Pagán of User Intelligence in Amsterdam argues that touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) may open up further paths toward a true Natural User Interface (NUI). “User interfaces for computers have come a long way from vacuum tubes and punch cards, and each advancement brings new possibilities and challenges.
Gestural interfaces. Touch interaction has become practically ubiquitous in developed markets, and that has changed users' expectations and the way UX practitioners think about human–computer interaction (HCI). Now, touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) are bleeding into the computing mainstream the way touch did years ago. These will again disrupt UX, from the heuristics that guide us, to our design patterns and deliverables.
Cases. Last week, iTunes became home to a historical first. This time, in the form of an ingenious app that turns an iPhone into a gesture-based calculator that replaces the most common mathematical function keys with finger swipes. Rechner is the work of Berger & Föhr, a two-man studio based in Boulder, Colorado.
Cases. Remember when you were five and you first learned how to make a shadow puppet of a dog by holding your palm in front of a flashlight and waggling your pinky finger? Making anything more complicated than that takes a lot of effort.
Gestural interfaces. The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is now available as a set of gorgeous, printable cards (thanks to Kimberly Fulton). The Touch Gesture Reference Card set includes: 1) an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands 2) how to utilize these gestures to support major user actions 3) a survey of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures.
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