Comments on Point and Do: Multitouch Video Editing App

This is where good paper & plastic prototyping...

2009-01-12T17:37:00.000-08:00

This is where good paper & plastic prototyping could prove to be useful.

It got me thinking about something I reviewed for a past HCI class that had a social networking component, I think.

Are you familiar with the Dynamo project? (I think that at least one of the people involved in the project now works at Microsoft)
Here is something I posted about the application, with a few links:
http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2007/09/about-interactive-displays-dynamo.html

I just spent an hour over the phone with my 79-year dad trying to explain to him how to do a few basic things on Facebook, like find my nephew's wall, how to write on the wall, and how to post what he'd written.

He wanted to look at pictures, too.

How could surface computing make this much easier for my dad?

(Take a look at the FaceBook interface and imagine that you have no prior experience interacting with a browser.)

By the way, I have an HP TouchSmart, and I can't navigate through much on FaceBook via touch. We need web browsers to be optimized for touch/gestures, just as many are now optimized for mobile devices.

@ Josh

Two finger tap gestures are subject ...

2009-01-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

@ Josh

Two finger tap gestures are subject to a lot of false hits.

Josh is right though. One really natural gesture is holding down the index and for finger for ~300-500ms. This is long enough to define intent and to make sure it's not a false hit...without feeling like a touch and hold gesture.

Longer Touch and hold gestures can actually be very successful. They run into two major issues, though:
1. They are difficult to discover.
2. It is difficult for users to know if their gesture isn't working because because:
- They are touching the wrong pixels
- They haven't held the gesture long enough
- The friggin' 'puter ain't workin'

I really like the general feel of this application...

2009-01-12T12:16:00.000-08:00

I really like the general feel of this application. The expansion and contraction of the video clips seems very natural, although if I'm trying to be extremely precise (down to the frame level) it seems like I'd have to expand a long clip far beyond what would be comfortable. In a standard program I could just click zoom a few times, or use a zoom bracket tool once or twice. I would experiment with a way to zoom to frames inline, maybe touch a location on the main clip and a zoomed clip segment of +- 2 seconds shows somehow.

Also I liked when he put two fingers down and it became scissors and then he cut a clip.

The dragging from one object to another, particularly applying the image filters (gamma correction?) to a clip seemed a bit odd. If I change something on a picture in real life, I don't make the change on a separate paper then drop the paper onto my picture. (If I were adding layers that might make sense though.) Some more direct method would be better, marrying the content and controllers as you said, but this is a very good start.

BTW any context menus need to be quick to activate -- no hold gestures -- so an advanced user can get quicker and quicker. Eventually navigating the context menu (maybe a circular menu around a two finger tap gesture) will become like a single gesture not needing the menu, but beginning users will still have the menu to look at.

Comments on Point and Do: Multitouch Video Editing App

This is where good paper & plastic prototyping...

@ JoshTwo finger tap gestures are subject ...

I really like the general feel of this application...

@ Josh

Two finger tap gestures are subject ...