No, gestures aren’t a failed usability experiment.
Tags: Usability, Google, UX, UX Design, Gestures

A lot of us would be of the opinion that smartphones have accelerated the speed of our interactions with the world of technology. But if you really think about it, we’ve moved from typing with our 10 fingers on our computer keyboard, to now using just 2 fingers on our smartphone screens I will not talk much about this bandwidth issue, as Elon Musk likes to call it, and his futuristic plans with Neuralink. Instead, this article will focus on a very specific topic — Gestures. Let’s explore how gesture interactions impact our digital experiences.

For the purpose of this article, we can categorize gestures into 2 parts as we gradually move from talking about the first to the second.

A. Touchscreen Gestures

B. Touchless Gestures

A. Touch screen gestures

When we transitioned to touch interfaces, the biggest concern was that interactions apart from taps did not have any signifiers.

Signifiers indicate an availability of an interaction by providing strong clues.

So as gestures do not have any visual representation, they rely on the user’s memory and learning. Hence, they had to be designed in a way that would occur very naturally to the user. Conventionally the most common gestures that unfolded were — double-tap, pinch, spread, drag, flick.

With visual cues and tutorials, these gestures can be easily trained to the users. When introducing a new form of gesture, various techniques like sending push notifications, showing walkthroughs, animated or haptic feedback to depict accomplishment can be used to onboard a user to the new idea and eventually make it an almost unforgettable habit for him.

Credits : Paul van Oijen

Let’s take a look at some of the most widely adopted gestures that we see today.

1. Pull to Refresh

The pull-to-refresh gesture is patented by Twitter. It first appeared in Twitter’s Tweetie mobile application developed by Loren Brichter. Although he initially planned to create a refresh mechanism that follows Apple’s platform conventions, Brichter’s work with pull-to-refresh resulted in a novel interaction new to Apple’s platform at the time, and one of the most common gestures we see today.

2. Swipe to Delete

This gesture was introduced by Apple in the iOS Mail app. Plenty of apps today use versions of this gesture from removing an item list, to even expose an entire set of contextual actions. The one we probably use the most would be WhatsApp’s and Instagram’s swipe to reply.

3. Double Tap to Like

Every Instagram post has a heart button to like the post. If someone asked you today about how you learned the alternative way of double-tapping the post to perform the same action of liking, chances are you would probably say you discovered it by mistake or a friend told you.

4. Tinder Cards

Tinder’s UI is one of the most interesting ways of using a cards based approach. The swipe gestures on the cards make it very quick for the user and almost make it addictive. This gamification has made the swipe gesture very popular, so much so that “Swipe Right” has become slang for liking someone on Tinder now.

All of these examples prove the fact that users can be more than willing to adopt gestures when they’re designed rightly.

Apple Home Screen Swipe Up

As the race began to make smartphone bezels thinner in order to maximize the screen real estate, Apple decide to remove the classic home button from the iPhone X. To access the Home Screen at any time, the users now have to swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen. Along with this they also added other gestural functionalities replacing some of the previously learned gestures by the users. The ‘home line’ that appears at the bottom of the screen, where the home button used to be, serves as a reminder for users to perform the swipe up.

Apple Home Screen Swipe Up

This bold move by Apple taught the industry that gestures can be experimented with. Gestures need not be just ‘quicker alternatives’ to features for enthusiasts and power users. Gestures can be the only interaction available for a particular action, like reaching the home screen of an iPhone.

Speaking of enthusiast gestures, some of the Android phones have had some really cool ones for a long time. These include drawing letters on your lock screen like O to open Camera and V to turn on the flashlight, squeezing the phone to launch the voice assistant, answering calls automatically by raising the phone to your ear, etc. These gestures have absolutely no signifiers, and they need not have any. The users who would want these features won’t find them difficult to learn.