Click and Move Added to Touchscreen Patterns

Less than a month after I wrote this:

If you compose a lot of mail or text heavily, then, yes, the iPhone may not be for you. However, its natural interactions and its ability to change its entire form from an iPod to a phone to a gaming console to web browser on the fly is a pretty major bonus and one that Blackberry is unlikely to be able to replicate, as a large percentage of their device is taken up with a hard keyboard.

what does RIM do but announce the Blackberry Storm, which naturally has a touchscreen interface that pretty much decimates my argument above.

But the touchscreen isn’t the only story; the type of touchscreen is. From PhoneScoop:

The big news about the display is the touch technology. First, it’s capacitive, like the iPhone and the HTC G1. This alone is great news, but the real innovation is the true tactile feedback. The whole screen is essentially one giant physical button that you can press down for a gratifyingly real “click” action. There are no haptics or funny tricks here; just good ol’ tactile feedback, and it works very well.

As you would expect, the click action lends a great deal to the experience of pressing virtual buttons and text entry. However, it also enables a whole new dimension (literally) in touch interaction. Capacitive touch technology requires no pressure; it responds to the very lightest touch. This means the Storm has two distinct ways to press the screen. A light touch is just a “touch”, while a more forceful press results in a “click”. This makes the Storm the first phone we know of with what could be considered a “3D” touch screen.

And just last week, Apple announced nearly the same technology (without the haptic feedback) on their new line of Macbook Pros:

Now the entire trackpad is the button, so you can click anywhere.

As Kevin Arthur rightly points out, these now implement what Bill Buxton was talking about in 1990 in a seminal paper A Three-State Model of Graphical Input (pdf).

What this basically means is instead of being able to either Tap to Select/Activate or Slide to Move, now you can combine them. With these touchscreens you can Click and Move, effectively adding (at least) one new interaction design paradigm to work with. Nifty.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Monday, October 20, 2008, at 8:58 am. Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, Touchscreens. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.