Re: [Usability] Touchscreen and gestures

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 18 Apr 2011, at 21:10, Kirk Bridger wrote:

> I think the quick answer here is no - it is not covered in our current draft material.  But I agree we can and should provide guidance here.  However I think this area of knowledge is still quite immature when compared to some of the other GUI patterns we're putting into the HIG.

Touch screen issues are certainly something we're more aware of this time around -- one possible "guideline" that's come up a few times in our discussions is that double-click as a primary action should go away as much as it can, for example. That benefits desktop users too, but I suspect touch screen usage would be the main driver to adoption.

The pattern library should also give us the ability to easily present alternative versions of the same pattern, and a "touch screen alternative" is certainly one reason to have that. Of course we'd like to minimise the number of things that you have to do differently for touch screens, but experience with other platforms suggests that sometimes you just have to do things a different way on different devices if you want the optimum user experience.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.