10 November 2008
State of the Union – Multi-touch, Independence Day (the movie) of usability
The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .
Head on forward for video and more analysis
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to beat the living **** out of their project. I really admire the things they have done, specially being two students and I realize that some of the things shown are just demos. I’m merely using the project as an example of how things are in commercial world, sometimes they resemble more of student works than actual commercial, well thought, product.
As the footage of the actual proves, multi-touch has become the only goal and value for the design, much like special effects in the movie Independence Day; forget plot, forget immersion, forget characters, the mere possibility to use “mind blowing” CGI thwarts everything that is actually important. That is exactly the case of this project: Can you honestly think of any more awkward way to show slides to someone? Every time he wants to show another slide he; picks one, drags it closer, zooms it, tries to place it nicely on the screen and then presses a button which is located completely somewhere else. Now, in usability wise, how did the user benefit from having multi-touch? That is the question people should ask, instead of “how could we do this in cool multi-touch way?“
Second thing that they show is more appropriate use for multi-touch, although it demonstrates another thing that is overlooked many times; the physical aspect of usability. You can clearly see how he really has to press his finger to the surface (I’d guess for the touch to register) and how his finger really isn’t sliding on the surface, hence he’s having hard time to color the mammal. Usability, acceptability, user experience are the keywords here. Honestly, at the moment, I can’t think of any other company besides Apple that really takes user experience into consideration, beyond the binary world of 1’s and 0’s. At the moment I’m writing this with Sony VAIO laptop, which has it vice versa; I like the physical form that it has, the keyboard and everything (besides the weird placement of USB ports) but they have managed to screw everything up with the software packaging; too much useless stuff which breaks everything
Next they show the puzzle. You can clearly see how he’s having hard time to rotate the small piece towards the end. Plus, the little things: Why aren’t the pieces snapping to the shapes shown? By snapping it to the shape (with small visual, color clue) the system could tell user that the input has been accepted, now you’re left wondering if you should put them precisely together, if some piece is couple of pixels off etc.
Then they proceed to scaling and rotating pictures. I don’t think even have to go further into this. It’s practically the most useless feature of any multi-touch device out there. Anyways, I’ve already gone through that in previous rant, Multi-touch is useless, dead. Same thing goes for videos.
So, there you have it, three things that suck at the moment in the world of multi-touch:
- Multi-touch becomes the very purpose of the product
- Physical aspect is overlooked many times, specially with new technology
- And the coolness dripping (and then yawn-introducing) technology demos that actually degrade the usability of a product
Video of the multi-touch OS project
