Gestures: Pushing the Boundaries of Touch-based Interfaces Gabriel Celemin Giro54 – User Experience Design Manuel Ugarte 1818, Apt 1 C. C1428BRH Buenos Aires, Argentina gabriel@giro54.com ABSTRACT
Touchscreens have become a key component of digital devices, from mobile phones to laptop PCs. Their characteristics enable new interactions –referred to as “gestures”– that extend beyond the traditional manipulation of elements on screen with a mouse and a keyboard. They also raise issues on how these interactions affect the design of digital products such as applications and websites, that must simultaneously serve people using operating system metaphors from different generations and present new challenges on how to standardize and develop best practices and design patterns. Author Keywords
Interaction techniques, gestures, touchscreen, post-WIMP interfaces, mobile devices, touch Figure 1. The Macintosh System 1.0 (1984) ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces --- Interaction styles INTRODUCTION
The introduction and proliferation of touch-screen based devices like the iPhone, the iPod Touch and –to a lesser extent– the touch-enabled PCs, is causing a revolution in HCI –especially in Interaction Design– not seen since the development of the mouse-driven Graphical User Interface (GUI) at Xerox PARC that moved us beyond the commind-line interface more than thirty-five years ago [3]. Interactions born with the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) paradigm such as point, click, doubleclick, select, drag & drop have been the standard since the early eighties and are as prevalent on the first Macintosh System (Figure 1) as on the last incarnation of Windows (Figure 2).
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Figure 2. Windows Vista Desktop
However, the physical keyboard and mouse are beginning to give place to the hands and fingers as ubiquitous input devices, thus creating a whole new world of interactions called “gestures” [6].
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