3 ms·

A good first step may be to have a standard way to show the gestures that are currently enabled (e.g. pinch, swipe). That way, you at least know what is signif

A good first step may be to have a standard way to show the gestures that are currently enabled (e.g. pinch, swipe). That way, you at least know what is significant to the current app in the current mode, and don't have to try a bunch of things. Though in some respects, it is unfair to criticize touch technology based on its initial use in phones, because those screens are small. Some of the article's goals aren't practical on a small screen, e.g. GUIs have "discoverable" interfaces because of always-visible menus, but a phone can't do this without seriously reducing usable screen space. On the other hand, the touch screen of an iPad probably should fix more of these problems. For instance, an iPad app can probably have a discoverable "menu bar" like a Mac app does, and not really hurt usable screen space.

raganwald 16y ago
A friend worked with a high end image manipulation program that had "pie" menus. You held the menu button down on your tablet, and after a pause a circular menu popped up at the mouse position. You dragged in the direction of your choice. If there were submenus for that choice, another circle popped up and so on. Because of fitts' law, this was far more efficient than standard popup menus: the 'target' for any choice was larger and therefore much easier to hit. The gestural part was this: If you held the menu button down and immediately started to move the mouse, it would select the choice without bothering to display the pie. Advanced users quickly learned the sequence of zigs and zags required for their most common menu operations and preferred using the pie menus to keyboard shortcuts or standard menus in the window panes. As the OP points out, this system provided discoverability as well as consistency. The same gesture always produced the same result.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  That is an incredibly good idea - it deserves to be widely copied.
- eagleal 16y ago
  That's what I've found too. I'm also using something similar to pie menus for my main project.
- nirmal 16y ago
  For searching ease, this variant of Pie Menus is called Marking Menus. PDF of paper http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93.7499&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....

raganwald 16y ago

A friend worked with a high end image manipulation program that had "pie" menus. You held the menu button down on your tablet, and after a pause a circular menu popped up at the mouse position. You dragged in the direction of your choice. If there were submenus for that choice, another circle popped up and so on. Because of fitts' law, this was far more efficient than standard popup menus: the 'target' for any choice was larger and therefore much easier to hit. The gestural part was this: If you held the menu button down and immediately started to move the mouse, it would select the choice without bothering to display the pie. Advanced users quickly learned the sequence of zigs and zags required for their most common menu operations and preferred using the pie menus to keyboard shortcuts or standard menus in the window panes. As the OP points out, this system provided discoverability as well as consistency. The same gesture always produced the same result.

abstractbill 16y ago
That is an incredibly good idea - it deserves to be widely copied.
eagleal 16y ago
That's what I've found too. I'm also using something similar to pie menus for my main project.
nirmal 16y ago
For searching ease, this variant of Pie Menus is called Marking Menus. PDF of paper http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93.7499&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....