Why everyone in the technology business should use a touch interface for at least a week

You don’t know what touch is, until you’ve used it.

I’ve been using a touch based mobile phone (an HTC Hero, running Android 1.5) for the last 4 or 5 days, and I’m convinced that everyone who is in the technology space must use a touch based device as one of their primary devices for at least a week.

I’m not asking you to switch to an iPad permanently. I’m not saying that the iPhone is better than your Nokia or your Blackberry. I’m not saying that touch will kill the keyboard. All I am saying is that touch is different, and the only way to really understand it is to use it for a while. After you’ve understood touch, you can go back to your favourite input interface. But remember, that if you’re in the business of technology, touch will be a major part of the lives of a major part of your customer-base in the foreseeable future – and it’s different enough that for every product you put out, you must ask yourself, how will this appear on a touch based device.

Why?

Here are some reasons:

Touch is different

Yes, in theory, I knew that interacting with a program using a touch based device is very different from interacting with it using a mouse and a keyboard. I already knew these things:

• Fingers are fatter than mouse pointers, and hence, all buttons need to be fatter
• Touch allows various new ways of interacting–like fling, and drag, and long-press

However, it is only after using the phone myself for day-to-day tasks that I realized that there are a hundred little things that make things different. For example:

• Most of the time, there is no keyboard. Which means that all your shortcut keys are gone. No <Del> to delete something, no Ctrl-C to copy, and no Ctrl-A to select all.
• There is no good way you can move your cursor to the middle of a sentence. So if you typed Naavin insted of Navin by mistake, normally you would simply take your cursor after the second a and then hit backspace. Guess what… there is no back arrow, and tapping on the screen to make your cursor go to spot just after the second a is almost impossible. The only way is to backspace all the way and re-type everything.
• The long-press is equivalent to the context menu in Windows/Linux (i.e. the menu you get when you right click the mouse on some item). Well, by definition, long-press takes a long time, and it painful enough that I simply avoid it and try to find alternative ways of doing things.
• When you’re interacting with the screen, your finger is actually covering the screen. This makes some things more difficult.
• There is no that allows you to skip to the next field when filling out a form. To get around this, some apps add a “Next” key to the keyboard when you’re filling out forms. You don’t realize how important this key is, until you’ve filled some forms and have to go to the next field by hiding the keyboard, scrolling and selecting the next field.

There’s a whole bunch of tiny issues like these that can completely kill a user experience unless the app has been specifically designed for the touch interface, by someone who actually uses a touch interface (as opposed to someone who’s just imagining the touch interface).

Touch will be a major part of your life

In spite of all the issues I pointed out above, I’m convinced that touch is a very intuitive interface, and is a huge improvement over mouse+keyboard for a large number of applications. Enough has been written about this on the web, so I will not repeat those arguments here. If you’ve not heard those arguments before, you should befriend Google.

But the point is that whether you like it or not, a major fraction of your customers/consumers will be using touch to consume your content. So, get with the program.

It’s not just about mobile apps

I somehow had this vague notion that the people who really need to spend time understanding touch are those who are building iPhone or Android apps. Then, while using my device, I realized that I was visiting a lot of vanilla websites using my mobile phone browser. And some of those sites sucked.

So, even if you’re not a mobile app developer, you still need to worry about touch. If you have any website out there, if you’ve put out any content on the web, you should spend some time in understanding how your content shows up on touch devices.

And, yes, this even applies to you if you don’t have anything really to do with the UI of whatever it is that you’re working on. The UI is the only thing about your product that the end user (the person who’s paying) interacts with. So better make sure you take an interest in that.

I said “primary device” and “1 week”

That’s right. You need to use a touch device as one of your primary devices for about a week before you “get” some of these issues. You need to view your content, or use your app, using that device to really understand.

I can count a long list of friends who played with a touch based device for about 15 minutes (mostly playing some games, and a photo album) before deciding that they’ve seen enough. But, good UI is about deciding which inconveniences does the user get used to over time, and which ones continue to remain a pain. And the only way you’ll know that is by going through it yourself.