Thoughtful gesture? Peter Coffee’s column misses the point.

As I leafed through my ever growing stack of tech magazines yesterday, a column in eWeek by Peter Coffee, entitled Thoughtful gestures – don’t make complexity elegant; make it disappear caught my eye. 

Mr. Coffee was writing about a patent application from Apple for processing multipoint gestures on a touch input device. The language of patent applications is notoriously dense and jargon laden, so in laymans terms, this is about making it easier to interpret what a user wants when they touch a screen or touch pad at multiple points at the same time.  Some simple examples of multipoint gestures include squeezing, stretching or twisting motions while touching a screen with your finger tips.

Mr. Coffee's contention is that this invention is a way of making more complex tasks easier to perform, that it has no real-world, practical application, and that this is the wrong problem for inventors to tackle. He states that “I’d rather see interface efforts based on watching what users do, understanding common needs and designing systems in which those actions are simple. Making complexity elegant is an achievement, but I'd rather just make that complexity invisible.”

This is a fine sentiment, and a good one-sentence description of user experience design, but he really misses the point of how new input device inventions relate to user-experience design.

He illustrates the uselessness of gestural interfaces by describing two ways of saving a users work – one using a whole series of convoluted gestures that makes the user look like she’s doing the Macarena, and a simple, elegant way of using keyboard strokes. Boy, based on that example, gestural interface sure sounds like a bad idea, and inventors should stick to improving how to use existing input devices.

The trouble with this example is that the same argument was made about the mouse when it joined the keyboard as an interface device. There were (and are) many things that are easier to do with a keyboard than with a mouse – saving a file using shortcuts, typing a letter, entering data in a spreadsheet, just to name a few. Does that make the mouse useless? Why use something as complicated as a mouse?

Let’s take the case of a user putting together a process diagram in Visio. Using a keyboard interface, a user can perform a lot of complicated keyboard strokes to generate, place, link and annotate the diagram elements. Meanwhile, back in the real world (as Mr. Coffee would say) the user simply drags and drops the elements in place using his mouse, touch pad or pointer.

Clearly, different interfaces are good for different types of actions, and it’s up to the user experience designer to apply the appropriate combination of available interfaces in a way that lets the user simplify and streamline their interactions.

So where might using a multipoint gesture interface simplify a current, real world interaction? How about Google Maps: Multipoint gestures such as squeezing, stretching or turning, combined with single point gestures like dragging, could make navigation significantly simpler and faster than the current mouse-based approach.

The point of inventions like this is not to make more complex acts achievable, but what things can be simplified using these inventions. Almost all ways in which we interface with computers are pretty complex. For example, learning to use a keyboard is a lot more complex and time consuming than learning to use a mouse, and learning to navigate using keyboard shortcuts requires much more familiarity with an application than using a mouse. Gestural interfaces need be no more complex than keyboard or mouse interfaces.

So inventors, keep inventing!  Between user experience designers, developers and usere, we'll take the best inventions to  make things genuinely simple.