How did multi-touch interfaces become natural when it should have been unnatural?

Question

After stumbling on a webpage that rants about the fallacy of "picture under glass", I began to wonder what was it that made multi-touch interfaces seemingly become so natural to all of us today?

We have been interacting with GUIs for so many years and the multi-touch interface, which is a new interface, should appear to us as unintuitive, or at least illogically unintuitive. For example, squeezing with 2 fingers on a screen to resize a picture isn't natural at all because other than the plasticine I used to play with as a kid that could allow me to manipulate its size by squeezing, there are few things in the physical world for me to relate this action to. I wouldn't have thought of this squeeze "gesture" if I hadn't been told about it.

How did all of us just begin to find such multi-touch interfaces natural?

Answer 1

A main component of natural interactions is Direct Manipulation. Traditional interaction methods (keyboard) are very efficient but often very unnatural because what you do and what happens on screen aren't necessarily very logically connected. This was a classic problem with command line interfaces (or worse, punch cards). The Graphical User Interface was largely a hit because of the Direct Manipulation it affords. As a bit of trivia, Video Games, especially Pong, quickly showed the ease of control direct manipulation can give people.

With touch interfaces you directly touch what you want to interact with, making buttons extremely natural. Panning and zooming might not occur exactly as they do with real world objects, but they operate exactly and move fluidly due to your manipulation. Move your finger 10 cm in a pan gesture and the screen scrolls 10 cm with your finger.

It's been shown repeatedly that users love Direct Manipulation. It creates an effective, engaging interface and allows the user to feel in control. Even if the exact action (like panning) isn't 100% intuitive, it is extremely easy to learn. The causality is very clear, leading to very few "wait, what did I press?" moments.

Answer 2

I think it has nothing to do with plasticine :). Hold up your hand and show "a small amount of something". You're probably pinching. "A pinch of salt" is a small amount of salt. I assure you that both the gesture and the expression have existed long before multi-touch :). Ask a person to demonstrate something large, and he will spread his hands. Ask him to demonstrate something growing smaller in size, and he will bring them closer together. If he needs to only use one hand, he'll do a pinching motion. Ask him to show something growing larger and he'll start from a pinch and spread his fingers or arms. The concept exists in our minds and we demonstrate it using our limbs.

Intuitive interfaces correspond first and foremost to mental concepts, while interfaces which only correspond to the way we operate on physical objects are less intuitive.

Answer 3

Multi-touch interfaces are no more 'natural' (the term itself is misleading, or at least poorly defined) in the context of interfaces. A keyboard is 'unnatural' but a far more effective input device for text than a touchscreenl. The difference is that the technology to make a multi-touch screen (and the portable computing device it sits on) has only recently been popularised and marketed - and as with many other interface types before, terms like 'natural' and 'intuitive' have been applied to help with marketing. Like any other technology, they are good for some problems, less good for others!

Answer 4

I disagree that the post argues that the interfaces are particularly "unnatural" -- as far as I can tell, it is about the visions of interfaces reaching much less far than the author thinks they could.

All of the squeeze gestures I know of are based on a simple and (in my opinion) natural principle: if you touch a spot and move your finger, the spot moves along. This is true for dragging, rotating, and for both kinds of resizing (zooming in and zooming out). With a third finger, one could keep two fingers in place and then skew the image with the third. Alternatively, if the image was 3D, it could be a rotation. I just came up with these interpretations a minute ago, but they're not anything new; they're just a natural extension of the same principle.

What the article does say is that limiting everything to this one principle is very limiting. Nobody ever holds their phone in the scissor grip because it wouldn't be any use. What if phone designers created a use for that? The Wii was a step forward in this regard -- you could do all kinds of things with your body and control games that way.

To give a further example of what we could have with the current "vision" versus a more future-oriented vision: let's say you have a graph and you'd like to manipulate the nodes and edges. The current vision could give you a flat table with the graph projected on it and let you touch a node and move it, or touch the side of a node and drag a new edge to another node. Another vision could give you a pit of sand and let you places smooth stones on it for nodes and run lines through the sand for edges. If I understand the article correctly, that's the kind of difference it's looking at, and I have to agree the first is a little underwhelming.

Answer 5

I think the point here is that at some point or other everybody has played with 'squeezy' stuff like plasticine (even if it was a long time ago)

You only need to learn what happens when you stretch it once.

Answer 6

First of all, Plasticine isn't the only thing that kids stretch, elastic bands, inflatable boats, telescopic pointing devices and baking doe stretch too.

Second of all, you usually use two hand to stretch or rotate physical objects. You can use two hands with the same interface used on multitouch screens. This is not commonly done simply because, although it is easier to do with two hands, often the device is not placed on a table, but held in one hand, therefore, you are only left with one available hand with which you can operate the device.