💾 Archived View for juliette.zone › gemlog › touchscreen-gestures.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:08:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on 2024-08-24
This is hardly a unique thought—heck, the human-computer interaction course I've TAed for years includes Norman and Nielsen's "Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backward in Usability" as a required text—but with how ordinary smartphones and tablets are, the terrible usability of touchscreen interfaces often fades into the background.
This is prompted by myself using a Gemini client, actually. I wanted to move two tabs over. On the first tab, I swipe right, and I move one tab over. I repeat the same swipe, and since this tab contains a list I delete a gemlog from my feed reader.
What?!
I understand full well that having modes in an interface is a great way to introduce cognitive load and ought to be avoided. I'm a vim user, I've been burned by this before. It's a whole other level of harmful when the mode switches without an intentional action, where there ceases to be a consistent mapping between action and reaction. It's so basic, but is so frequently ignored, and I don't know why we take it anymore!
"But the lack of consistency and inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery, threatens the viability of these systems." (Norman and Nielsen, 2010)
If only it actually did.
Maybe it's getting older, maybe it's that I've been an HCI person for a while, but I can't tolerate how much software is bad. If you're lucky it'll work, but it'll still probably be half usable and somehow a bloated mess nobody can fully understand. I'd love to move away from it all and just use the simple stuff for a while.