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Notes: 1 / 1 year ago from designaday
Designing for Touch Screens and Interactive Gestures
I attended Dan Saffer and Bill DeRouchey’s workshop at Interaction ’09 titled Designing for Touch Screens and Interactive Gestures. While a lot of good information was communicated (Did you know that the largest portion of the brain is devoted to your mouth, while the second largest controls your hands?), much of it was old hat for me. I’ve been designing UIs for tablet PCs with touch and/or stylus input for about as long as I’ve been working in the field, and most of the considerations are the same. For example, it is better to place controls at the bottom of the screen, rather than the top, because in reaching for the controls at the top, you obscure the screen with your hand and arm.
What I found most valuable was the exercise. I’ve never thought highly of paper prototypes. I know, a lot of designers swear by them, but I find them much too tedious to be of use. I can spend the same amount of time or less creating an interactive prototype in Director that is the same or greater fidelity. In my opinion, paper prototypes work well for very simple interactions. Once you start rigging scroll bars with string, you are taking things to a ridiculous extreme.
The workshop, however, made me realize that the new frontier of large scale, touch sensitive displays is the perfect application for paper prototypes. I stated that paper prototypes work well for simple interactions. I now believe it can be measured as a bell curve. In the middle, there is a large area of medium complexity that is too tedious to model with paper and only moderately time consuming to represent in software. Then, as you push beyond the fat point of the curve, you get to a level of complexity that is quite difficult to model with our current, computer-based tools, and paper comes to the rescue.
Our class had been broken into several groups, and we were tasked with designing a music purchasing experience for a retail space. We were given a size constraint, which was, conveniently enough, approximately the size of the circular dining tables at which we were seated. We used paper, markers, and tape to hastily create a very rough prototype of our solution, which borrowed heavily from Microsoft’s Surface. I was particularly fond of our solution, but I was very impressed with how well paper worked in this instance.
It lends itself perfectly to the problem space. You can’t prototype at that scale on a computer screen. You would have to do some pretty fancy stuff to get a projector hung straight down from the ceiling, and then mimic the users motions in near-real-time to make it at all feasible in software. With paper, you can make every element to size, and the test subject can slide pieces of paper around as much as they want.
I don’t know how long it will be before I have the opportunity to design such an interface for real, but I do know that when that time comes, I’ll likely be adding paper prototyping to my toolbelt.
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