Gestural Interfaces:
A Step Backward In Usability

Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University | [e-mail]

Jakob Nielsen
Nielsen Norman Group | [e-mail]

One step forward, two steps back.

[1] Norman, D. A. “Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural.”  interactions 17, 3, (2010); http://interactions.acm. org/content/?p=1355/

Once again, the usability crisis is upon us. We suspect most of you thought it was over. After all, HCI certainly understands how to make things usable, so the emphasis has shifted to more engaging topics, such as new applications, new technological developments, and the challenges of social networks and ubiquitous connection and communication. Well, you were wrong.

In a recent column for interactions, Norman pointed out that in the rush to develop gestural (or “natural”) interfaces, well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated [1]. Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-established principles leads to usability disaster.

screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: Anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: Anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.” [2]

Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:

• The lack of established guidelines for gestural control

But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but it’s important to realize radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through small and sustained incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.

 

September + October 2010

[2] Nielsen, J. “iPad Usability: First Findings from User Testing.” Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, 26 April 2010. http://www.useit.com/ alertbox/ipad.html/

Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman Group performed usability tests on Apple’s iPad, reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cell phones (notably the iPhone and Android devices) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple’s iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to

• The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

There are several fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:

• The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research, which results in their feeling empowered to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

• Visibility (also called per-
ceived affordances or signifiers)

• Feedback

• Consistency (also known as standards)

• Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)

interactions

In response to Nielsen’s article about the iPad usability studies, some critics claimed it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree.

• Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus.

• Scalability: The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.