The curse of the cursor

I think that one of the best things we will get with Windows 8 is that touch screen driven interaction will be more familiar to all users. It is time for this technology, contemporaneous with the first mouse prototype dated more than 45 years ago, to gain a place among users.

Touching is a normal, intuitive, and often unconscious behavior that most users will just "do it". "Do not touch" sings are found in all museums; guess why! The reason is that touching is the most natural way that one can use to explore. Explore is the best way to learn a new interface.

Some people are already familiar with touch screen technology. Touch screen interfaces are found in a few popular devices e.g. smartphones, tablets, Point of Sale, Photo Kiosk. Yet, the number of users using touch screen monitors to operate their computers or laptops is low.

Generally speaking, most users might assume in a touch screen environment that by using their finger they will be also able to do all they used to do with the pointer device. For example, to select or mass select objects, drag and drop objects, present the options in a drop-down menu, and activate components.

Users will need to figure out which pointer-device-gesture matches hand-gesture. It is here where UX designers should intervene to ensure a smooth transaction.  Hand-interaction is missing a few components that a pointer-device offers to the users. For example, right click, scroll wheel, keyboard modifier keys.  As a result, users might perceive hand-interaction as modest in compare with pointer-device interaction.

Furthermore, users would soon notice that not having the pointer-device is not only about some missing actions. It is also about lacking some information that helped them interact with their systems. This information is visually delivered via the pointer cursor.

Pointer cursors help users in many ways. The cursor's look provides feedback to the user. For example, the cursor shape help to distinguish modes e.g. crop image, scale image. Also, the cursor gives information about the system activity e.g. busy reading a file. Moreover, the pointer hot-spot, the location to which they point, helps users to guide the cursor's navigation. Also, the cursor very often is used to discover the clickable areas that the interface might have. Touch screen interaction does not use a cursor. Therefore, users cannot get advantages of all the commodities it can offer. The UX designer should find the way to deliver these advantages.

It is clear that the context of use would dictate the design solution UX designers would propose. The following list presents a set of informal ideas to cope with these problems:

• My first guess would be that objects in the interface would help to cope with these problems. For example, designated area in the object would offer a semantic value e.g. dragging from the left-top corner would move the object, dragging from the right-bottom would copy.
• Touch screen working in combination with keyboard modifier keys.
• More ambitious solution would require more advanced technology:
  • The touch screen would react not only to physical touch but also to proximity of physical objects to the screen e.g. the finger getting close to the screen would reveal whether that area is clickable or not.
  • The touch screen would distinguish which finger triggered the action.

So far I have talked about moving the pointer device interaction to hand-interaction. However, I am quite sure that there will be things we can do with hand-interaction that would be projected into pointer device interaction. It is very likely that we will find some problems ....I talk about this next time....What about you? Any thoughts about solving a cursor-less interaction?