Do touch interfaces increase user expectations?

25 June 2007 by Rod McLaren

I wonder if we have higher expectations of interfaces that feel more natural – for instance mobiles with touch screen and stroke interfaces as compared to those with button, thumbwheel, trackballs, stylus etc interfaces. I was reading the summary of Strategy Analytics’ Positive Learning Curve for Touchscreen Devices report (via MobileCrunch) and Marek’s review of the HTC Touch’s broken experience and got thinking about whether the type of interface directly affects the user’s expectations.

This is my speculative reasoning:

UIs are physically mediated (distanced from us) by things like buttons, and cognitively mediated by the need to roll a wheel to scroll the cursor focus. Perhaps the amount of mediation in between the user and the application is important in setting expectation.

To touch something would be to minimise the distance between human, the interface act and the interface response. So gestural and touch interfaces done well are really good (Nintendo Wii maybe? – haven’t played with it enough to know), and if done poorly – or merely quite well – can seem utterly broken.

With a touch/stroke UI, like the LG Prada, the HTC phone and forthcoming Apple iPhone, your finger is rubbing over the application itself, catching on the UI – it’s practically immersed in the data.

If that’s the case, “more natural” interfaces would be riskier because we bring a higher level of expectation to them (_this should behave as if I’m reaching out and touching, pushing it… because that’s what I’m doing_), and therefore a much lower tolerance for failure. (Are we more forgiving of “less natural” interfaces because we don’t expect them to behave like something “natural”? Do we happily forgive buttons that jiggle loosely in our mobile phones, whilst getting enraged at the touch-screen buttons on ticket machines at train stations?)

That distinction I’ve made between more and less natural is probably pretty shaky: Clifford Nass reminds us that we treat computers like people, which would hint that the buttons that drive an interface “disappear” naturally as we use it, the “unnatural” quickly becoming internalised, innate, habituated to the extent that our bodies react to them unconsciously. The other way to put it is that buttons are exactly what is natural to fingers. (Bill DeRouchey traces the first portable electro-mechanical button back to Ever Ready’s flashlight, 1898, but mechanical ones must go all the way back past typewriters to … what I wonder?) Is there a difference between pointing with a finger and pressing a button, except the obvious one of distance?

[Images courtesy of Apple and Microsoft.]

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