Don’t Touch That!
A funny thing happened the other day. Daniel (my three year old) and I were home and while I worked he was watching cartoons on Netflix. We stream through the Wii so I’m making the assumption here that the UI between the various console steaming options are the same. Anyway, the Spongebob episode he was watching finished and he told me he wanted to watch something else. I navigated back up through the menus and was about to scroll through selections when he started batting at the screen. Swipe, swipe, swipe. What the heck are you doing kid?
But then it struck me. He was trying to move the items on the screen.
Unlike a lot of parents I know, I’m not adverse to handing my sons my iPhone and letting them play. Daniel is particularly adept at moving through the interface. Good touch UIs are inherently intuitive and he doesn’t suffer from the prejudices built up by using a mouse and keyboard. He might not accomplish a lot in Angry Birds but by golly he sure has fun trying. It should have occurred to me then that when he saw a left-right, up-down interface with big icons that he’d assume it was a touch UI. I didn’t correct him when he did it and just sat back and simulated it for him with the remote.
With the advent of usable tablet computers like the iPad and Galaxy Tab, the keyboard and mouse are slowly slipping out of our lives. It will probably take 10 or 15 years for them to disappear, my older son’s generation grew up on them, but they are going away. The multitouch interface is taking over. Even to the point that some day even “real” computers like the one I’m using to write this will just be a screen with a virtual keyboard and built-in kick stand to hold it up. Heck, Apple has even patented the technology (The Mother Lode: Welcome to the iMac Touch). Multitouch is here to stay. It looks like I’ll be spending the next 10 years explaining to Daniel why he can’t touch that.
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Posted on Sunday October 3rd
