them with generous click zones.
Others are inherent in any new
technology that will have its
bugs—that much more reason
to enhance user empowerment
by designing according to the
other interaction principles
we have listed in this article.
Lack of undo. Undo! One of
the most brilliant inventions
of usable computer interfaces
seems mostly to have been
forgotten. It is very difficult to
recover from accidental selections or checking of boxes. First,
the result often takes you to a
new location. Second, it may
not even be obvious what action
got you there. For example, if
a finger accidentally scrapes
an active region, triggering an
action, there is almost no way to
know why the resulting action
took place because the trigger
was unintentional.
Novel interaction Methods
Gestural systems do require
novel interaction methods.
Indeed, this is one of their virtues. We can tilt and shake,
rotate and touch, poke and
probe. The results can be
extremely effective while also
conveying a sense of fun and
pleasure. But these interaction
styles are still in their infancy, so
it is only natural to expect that
a great deal of exploration and
study still needs to be done.
Shaking has become a stan-
dard way of requesting another
choice, a choice that seems to
have been discovered acciden-
tally, but that also feels natural.
Note, however, that although it
is easy and fun to shake a small
cell phone, shaking a large pad
is neither easy nor much fun.
Scrolling through long lists can
now be done by rapid swiping of
the fingers, providing some visu-
al excitement, but we still need
to work out the display dynam-
ics, allowing the items to gather
speed, to keep going through
a form of “momentum,” yet to
make it possible to see where one
is in the list while it whizzes past,
and to enable rapid stopping once
the desired location seems near.
the Promise of
Gestural interfaces
The new interfaces can be a
pleasure to use and a pleasure to
see. They also offer the possibil-
ity of scaling back the sometimes
heavy-handed visual language
of traditional GUIs that were
designed back when nobody had
seen a scrollbar. In the early
1980s, usability demanded GUI
elements that fairly screamed
“click me.”
Desktop GUIs are already less
neon than Windows 3.0, and we
can afford to dial back the visual
prominence a bit more on tab-
lets, which will further enhance
their aesthetics. But dialed back
doesn’t mean invisible.
The new displays promise to
revolutionize media: News and
opinion pieces can be dynamic,
with short video instead of still
photographs and adjustable
figures that can be manipulated instead of static diagrams.
Consumer Reports could publish
its rating tables with reader-controlled weights, so each
viewer would have a tailored set
of recommendations based upon
standardized test results.
The new devices are also fun
to use: Gestures add a welcome
feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and
clicking.
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.
We urgently need to return to
our basics, developing usability
guidelines for these systems that
are based upon solid principles
of interaction design, not on the
whims of the company-interface
guidelines and arbitrary ideas of
developers.
AbOut the AuthOrs Don Norman
and Jakob Nielsen are co-founders of the
Nielsen Norman group. Norman is a profes-sor at Northwestern University, visiting pro-fessor at KAIST (South Korea), and author.
His latest book is Living with Complexity.
Norman can be found at jnd.org.
DOi: 10.1145/1836216.1836228 © 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0900 $10.00
Nielsen founded the “dis-
count usability engineer-
ing” movement for interface
design and has invented
several usability methods,
September + October 2010
