6. Time for Touch

The iPhone is the technology every other company wants to catch up with. But touch screens have been around since the 1970s, Dan Saffer of design agency Adaptive Path reminded people of that at Etech. In 1983, HP brought out a personal computer with a touch screen; GO Corporation had a pen-based handheld device in 1987 and a touch-screen mobile phone called Simon was on sale in 1994. We have touch-screen check-in kiosks in airports and hand towel dispensers that you wave at, and Saffer says that’s preparing us for a new kind of interface using gestures.

“We’ve been training a significant proportion of the population with gestures for about 20 years now. The technology is in place to mass produce this stuff,” Saffer said. “We’re able to have more natural interactions with systems that are less cumbersome – and there’s more fun to be had.”

The keyboard will never go away and buttons are better than touch screens on gas pumps when it’s so cold you have to wear gloves, Saffer said. Oil from fingers can make touch screens slippery; if that means your finger slips on the screen of the voting machine and the system crashes, your vote doesn’t get counted. But there are tricks to making a touch interface work well: make the active button bigger than the picture of the button, predict which keys someone is likely to type on next and make their touch area bigger. Gestures need to be simple, like swiping your hand over the wall to turn on the light and lowering your hand to dim it. But there are going to have to be standards for gestures soon, Saffer said, “so you don’t have to go into a room and think ‘is this an Microsoft room or an Apple room - do I need to clap to turn the TV on or wave?’”

Touch pioneer Jeff Han was expected at ETech but he’d been working so hard building the CNN touch screen system for the presidential election that he couldn’t make it. Instead, Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research showed off a touch-screen system she’d designed to bring together American and Japanese research teams at Xerox PARC. Email, online gaming and Web conferencing had all failed to help the teams bond so she added a camera to a touch screen used as a public notice board, the touch screen enabled the author of a message to see who was reading the message. And rather than having training sessions, Churchill relied on people watching someone else use the system – like a lurker in an online community.