I've been having a brilliant offline conversation with JoshB. He brought up an aspect of MS Surface Multi-touch Othodoxy that I just disagree with:
"My understanding of NUI was that you have fewer paths but the frequency of interaction is higher and more contextual relative to GUI."
I'm going to get heretical here and say that multitouch in existing kiosk applications (ATMs, Ticket kiosks, etc.) is a usability disaster waiting to happen.
In "single serving" applications, you want modeless interactions and a linear decision tree. If you are going to design a linear decision path and minimize interaction modes, why not go a step further and just do single point directed disclosure...like every ATM in christendom.
It cuts hardware costs in half and increases usability.
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Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteIn public spaces, single-touch interaction is not well-evolved. I shudder to think of what might happen on the same sort of system, but multi-touch enabled. Here are links to video clips I took while I unsuccessfully interacted with single-touch displays:
What NOT to do:
Ballantyne Touch Screen in the Rain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx9qStm1PCM
User-Unfriendly Information Kiosk Interactive Map (Cleveland Clinic)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqYVS_6y8r4
Fade to Red
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aagkskjfWf8
There actually are some well defined best practices for single touch interfaces...
ReplyDeleteThese people clearly didn't know them.