Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface (CHI 2010)

Contrast with the way apple enhances touch keyboards. The iPhone anticipated the next letters you are likely to type and invisibly makes the target for these keys larger. So, if you come close to hitting a likely key but hit the edge of it’s neighbor, it “knows” what you meant.
Both phones can sometimes be confused by ambiguous choices. Android is shown handling this in the video with a pop-up menu. iPhone tells you which word it is expecting, allowing you to hit space to auto-complete it. I don’t know if Android has auto-complete but they do have an easy way to correct a word by double clicking. The Apple solution doesn’t offer a simple correct (that I have yet discovered).

Product vision: actual features and functionality may vary.

I can believe they are working on this. What I cannot believe is that it works as well as shown in the video. I wish that had something that worked this well.

Project Natal for XBOX 360

Designing a good gesture or multi-touch based system is first and foremost about designing a good system that happens to be gesture or multi-touch based. Following a general overview of gesture, multi-touch, and multi-user systems, I explain in this article how you can leverage traditional UX designing for these new types of systems. Using four well-known user experience principles as a starting point — affordances, engagement, feedback, and not making people think — I explore how they can be applied to these new types of systems. Read more…

“It took some time for them to start reading, because this representation is totally different from anything else that they had previously used,” says Rantala. But once the volunteers were used to it, they were able to speed it up and read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds Read more…

• Tap and Double-tap – Touch and release to click. This is the most basic touch action. Can also double-tap to open files and folders. Tolerances are tuned to be larger than with a mouse. This works everywhere.
• Drag – Touch and slide your finger on screen. Like a dragging with a mouse, this moves icons around the desktop, moves windows, selects text (by dragging left or right), etc. This works everywhere.
• Scroll – Drag up or down on the content (not the scrollbar!) of scrollable window to scroll. This may sound basic, but it is the most used (and most useful – it’s a lot easier than targeting the scrollbar!) gesture in the beta according to our telemetry. You’ll notice details that make this a more natural interaction: the inertia if you toss the page and the little bounce when the end of the page is reached. Scrolling is one of the most common activities on the web and in email, and the ability to drag and toss the page is a perfect match for the strengths of touch (simple quick drags on screen). Scrolling is available with one or more fingers. This works in most applications that use standard scrollbars.
• Zoom – Pinch two fingers together or apart to zoom in or out on a document. This comes in handy when looking at photos or reading documents on a small laptop. This works in applications that support mouse wheel zooming.
• Two-Finger Tap – tapping with two fingers simultaneously zooms in about the center of the gesture or restores to the default zoom – great for zooming in on hyperlinks. Applications need to add code to support this.
• Rotate – Touch two spots on a digital photo and twist to rotate it just like a real photo. Applications need to add code to support this.
• Flicks – Flick left or right to navigate back and forward in a browser and other apps. This works in most applications that support back and forward.
• Press-and-hold – Hold your finger on screen for a moment and release after the animation to get a right-click. This works everywhere.
• Or, press-and-tap with a second finger – to get right-click, just like you would click the right button on a mouse or trackpad. This works everywhere.

Read more…

When I started working at Xerox in 1996, they were still using “Global View” UI on some computers. Although the system had been surpassed in many ways by other 1996 OSs, some of the “old-timers” at Xerox insisted there were many things about it that have not yet been equaled in ease of use in modern operating systems (such as file sharing and network printing). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to use the system and it wasn’t until they were gone I realized Global View was essentially the same as Star.

Another interesting note, at the time I was unaware of the advances in UI in the Unix world. Irix 3 in 1986 was well ahead of it’s time with greater color-depth and a more mature design than other more mainstream systems.

Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, Linux, Symbian OS, and more.

We’ll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.

I should mention that this article showcases only the significant advances in GUI design (not operating system advances) and also not all of the graphical user interfaces and operating systems existing today. Read more…